[Solar-talk] $this->output Discussion

[Rodrigo Moraes]

> On 9/12/07, Raymond Kolbe <rkolbe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Such as...you would just call `get()` or `set()` to do just that...get
> > and set your data members.
> >
> > As I am writing this I am starting to think it would not be a great
> > idea since you should never have to declare a lot of data members for
> > output anyways. Most of the text/data that you would want to output
> > would probably come from other objects.
> >
> > Anyways, here is what I came up with (straight forward) and I think I
> > might implement it in one of my projects. Let me know what you all
> > think -- pros? cons?
> >
> > http://pastebin.com/m4ac35c79

Hi. The biggest "con" is to lose control over which variables the
controller has and can use. Freely assigning vars is immediately
practical, but can become a mess imo. Declaring those vars is a way to
document them and know which are available. But... if you think it is
not that bad, there are several workarounds you can made - and yours
looks good. :)

I use an array for forms, so I don't need to set a variable for forms
on each controller - instead, I have $forms['my_form_name'] - $forms
is in the base application since almost all pages have a form anyway.
Similarly, Solar_App_Base has other arrays grouping variables by type
($layout_head, for example).

> Solar_View has a method assign() which it uses to assign variables.
> You can use it in your controllers like this:
>
> $this->_view_object->assign('var', 'value');

Yes, and it is easy to assign an associative array, like in Raymond's idea:

    $this->_view_object->assign($this->output);

Keys will be used as variable names, so with $this->output =
array('foo' => 'bar'), you will have $this->foo available in the view
templates (so it would not be necessary to use get() there).

- rodrigo