Generating partial sections of a web page - PHP

When it comes to generating both static and dynamic web pages, CodeIgniter gives PHP developers the liberty of working with different approaches that can be easily adapted to suit the requirements of a huge variety of web applications. Building web pages using CI demands that you always deal with one or multiple views, generally represented in the form of HTML files that contain embedded PHP variables. Therefore, if you’re a CI user who want to learn to manipulate views in some clever ways, keep reading. In this series of articles, you’ll find a comprehensive guide to several methods you can implement within your own CI-based applications to handle view files in a truly efficient manner.

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By: Alejandro Gervasio

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April 09, 2009

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As I stated in the previous segment, it’s possible to pass a third Boolean argument to the $this->load->view()” method to return its output as a string after it has been parsed. By using this approach, it is also very simple to build sections of a web page independently, in a way similar to the method shown in the preceding article.

To demonstrate how this approach can be successfully implemented, first I’m going to create some new view files, which are listed below:

(definition of ‘main_page.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

<title>Sample Web Page</title>

body{

padding: 0;

margin: 0;

background: #999;

}

#container{

width: 600px;

margin: 0 auto;

}

#header{

padding: 10px;

background: #eee;

}

#content{

padding: 10px;

background: #9cf;

}

#footer{

padding: 10px;

background: #eee;

}

h1{

font: bold 2em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

margin: 0 0 18px 0;

color: #039;

}

h2{

font: bold 1.5em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

margin: 0 0 18px 0;

}

font: normal .8em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

margin: 0 0 18px 0;

}

</style>

</head>

<body>

<?php

echo $header.$content.$footer;

</div>

</body>

</html>

(definition of ‘header_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut.</p>

</div>

(definition of ‘content_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

<?php if($users->num_rows > 0):?>

<?php foreach($users->result() as $user):?>

<p><strong>First Name: </strong><?php echo $user->firstname;?></p>

<p><strong>Last Name: </strong><?php echo $user->lastname;?></p>

<p><strong>Email: </strong><?php echo $user->email;?></p>

<hr />

<?php endforeach;?>

<?php endif;?>

</div>

(definition of ‘footer_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut.</p>

</div>

Hopefully, at this point the group of view files coded above should be fairly familiar to you, right? Naturally, these are responsible for generating different sections of a web page, plus there’s one that acts like a general layout, called “main_page.php,” which loads the values returned from the other views.

With this handy view structure at our disposal, now it’s time to see how it can be used in conjunction with the strings returned by the “$this->load->view()” method to build an entire web document.

This task will be performed by a controller, and its definition will be shown in the next few lines. So, jump ahead and read the following section, please.

Next: Putting all of the views together >>