Web Frameworks - Workbook - Week 03

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Create a Layout

You may have noticed that the view scripts in the previous sections were HTML fragments- not complete pages. This is by design; we want our actions to return content only related to the action itself, not the application as a whole.

Now we must compose that generated content into a full HTML page. We'd also like to have a consistent look and feel for the application. We will use a global site layout to accomplish both of these tasks.

There are two design patterns that Zend Framework uses to implement layouts: Two Step View and Composite View. Two Step View is usually associated with the Transform View pattern; the basic idea is that your application view creates a representation that is then injected into the master view for final transformation. The Composite View pattern deals with a view made of one or more atomic, application views.

In Zend Framework, Zend_Layout combines the ideas behind these patterns. Instead of each action view script needing to include site-wide artifacts, they can simply focus on their own responsibilities.

Occasionally, however, you may need application-specific information in your site-wide view script. Fortunately, Zend Framework provides a variety of view placeholders to allow you to provide such information from your action view scripts.

To get started using Zend_Layout, first we need to inform our bootstrap to use the Layout resource. This can be done by adding the following line to your application/configs/application.ini file, within the production section:

; application/configs/application.ini

; Add to [production] section:
resources.layout.layoutPath = APPLICATION_PATH "/layouts/scripts"

The final INI file should look as follows:

; application/configs/application.ini

[production]
; PHP settings we want to initialize
phpSettings.display_startup_errors = 0
phpSettings.display_errors = 0
includePaths.library = APPLICATION_PATH "/../library"
bootstrap.path = APPLICATION_PATH "/Bootstrap.php"
bootstrap.class = "Bootstrap"
resources.frontController.controllerDirectory = APPLICATION_PATH "/controllers"
resources.layout.layoutPath = APPLICATION_PATH "/layouts/scripts"

[staging : production]

[testing : production]
phpSettings.display_startup_errors = 1
phpSettings.display_errors = 1

[development : production]
phpSettings.display_startup_errors = 1
phpSettings.display_errors = 1