Hi guys
I just started my first Yii 2.0 project having worked on a large Yii 1 project for a year. This question could easily apply to Yii 1 but hey, I’m working on Yii 2 so I’ll post it here! 
Basically I have to make a site that is accessible (it’s an assignment for my Masters Accessibility course, I use 1.1.14 at work). Everything is fine so far and I’m nearly finished the project but for a few refinements here and there.
For example, I’d like to automate putting the tabindex attribute in links etc. Unfortunately, Javascript is a non-runner as a solution so it all has to happen in good old PHP and HTML.
My ‘solution’ has been to add a method to my custom helper class that increments a static variable.
When I call this method in the navbar in layouts/main.php, all is good. The logo link and the other links in the navbar get tab indexes that are incremented correctly. Any other links etc that implement this method in layout/main.php are also fine.
The problem comes when I implement the method in other view files that are rendered in main.php as $content. Lets say I have one link in the view to be rendered within layouts/main.php, it will get a tab index of 1 which mucks up all the tab indexes above it. I understand that it is all to do with the view rendering flow, so I’m just wondering if anyone has a trick to get around this, or maybe I’m just approaching the whole thing wrong.
For what it’s worth, here is the static method and variable in my helper class:
/**
* @var int The static tab index number
*/
protected static $tabIndexNum = 0;
/**
* For automating tabindex in Yii rendered links etc
* @return array
*/
public static function autoTabIndex() {
return ['tabindex' => ++static::$tabIndexNum];
}
/**
* Extended List Options to be used in Yii rendered links etc
* to automate tabindexing as well as adding any other options
* @param null $options Other options such as 'class' etc
* @return array
*/
public static function extListOptions($options = null) {
return array_merge(static::autoTabIndex(), is_null($options) ? [null] : $options);
}
) and the static variable is reset back to zero. I have no links in the bottom part of main.php, i.e., under $content, so I don’t have to worry about that.