Rendering views in other places in Yii2 - no renderPartial?

Question

I need to render a partial view inside a custom component file in Yii2 and according to the Yii docs you can access the view instance via something like this:

\Yii::$app->view->renderFile('@app/views/site/license.php');

I went ahead and tried:

Yii::$app->view->renderPartial('//my/view/');

...but then got an error that I was trying to access a non-existent method.

I then checked out the view class and noticed it doesn't have a renderPartial and this is a method of the controller class instead.

I see it has a renderFile method and a render method; which of these should I use?

The docs don't state the render method includes the layout like the method of the same name from the controller class, so I'm not sure; as for renderFile I'm not 100% sure if that is suitable either?

Could someone explain which method would produce the same results that renderPartial produces?

Answer 1

You can call renderPartial from Yii::$app->controller->renderPartial('myview'); Also as you can see from source code of yii\base\Controller renderPartial calls View's render method so you can use Yii::$app->view->render. Basically there is no difference between render and renderFile, because render internally calls renderFile. But when you use render you can pass $view in several formats like path alias, absolute path whithin application or whithin module and relative path. And to renderFile you can pass only absolute file path or path alias.