Table of Contents
Zend_View is a class for working with the "view" portion of the model-view-controller pattern. That is, it exists to help keep the view script separate from the model and controller scripts. It provides a system of helpers, output filters, and variable escaping.
Zend_View is template system agnostic; you may use PHP as your template language, or create instances of other template systems and manipulate them within your view script.
Essentially, using Zend_View happens in two major steps: 1. Your controller script creates an instance of Zend_View and assigns variables to that instance. 2. The controller tells the Zend_View to render a particular view, thereby handing control over the view script, which generates the view output.
As a simple example, let us say your controller has a list of book data that it wants to have rendered by a view. The controller script might look something like this:
<?php
// use a model to get the data for book authors and titles.
$data = array(
array(
'author' => 'Hernando de Soto',
'title' => 'The Mystery of Capitalism'
),
array(
'author' => 'Henry Hazlitt',
'title' => 'Economics in One Lesson'
),
array(
'author' => 'Milton Friedman',
'title' => 'Free to Choose'
)
);
// now assign the book data to a Zend_View instance
Zend::loadClass('Zend_View');
$view = new Zend_View();
$view->books = $data;
// and render a view script called "booklist.php"
echo $view->render('booklist.php');
?>
Now we need the associated view script, "booklist.php". This is a PHP script like any other, with one exception: it executes inside the scope of the Zend_View instance, which means that references to $this point to the Zend_View instance properties and methods. (Variables assigned to the instance by the controller are public properties of the Zend_View instance.) Thus, a very basic view script could look like this:
<?php if ($this->books): ?>
<!-- A table of some books. -->
<table>
<tr>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Title</th>
</tr>
<?php foreach ($this->books as $key => $val): ?>
<tr>
<td><?php echo $this->escape($val['author']) ?></td>
<td><?php echo $this->escape($val['title']) ?></td>
</tr>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</table>
<?php else: ?>
<p>There are no books to display.</p>
<?php endif; ?>
Note how we use the "escape()" method to apply output escaping to variables.