renderPartial in extensions

Archives Yii 1.0.x Discussions
1

I see that widgets have good view rendering support, but I found that I can not render views inside of my extension (I'm creating an email extension).  This was the only way I could render a view:

Yii::app()->controller->renderPartial(…)

But the problem is that is will only look for views in the 'application.views' directory, not in application.components.views as I would like and seems to make more sense

The reason I want my email extension (or would you call it a component? should it extend CApplicationComponent as it does now?) to render a view is that the extension can be put into a 'debug' mode, in which the extension outputs the email to the layout (so I would like to take use of a view) instead of actually emailing it.

I would also like the extension to support using views as the email content, and even layouts, as CakePHP does.

2

How to define your email extension depends on how you would use this extension.

You can always use CController::renderViewFile() to render a view file if you find render() or renderPartial() doesn't fulfill your needs.

3

I think we probably can allow using path alias to specify a view. For example, Yii::app()->controller->render('@application.extensions.email.views.registration') would translate to rendering the view file 'protected/extensions/email/views/registration.php'.

To make the path alias shorter, a new alias can be defined by using render(). For example,

Yii::setPathOfAlias('email', dirname(FILE).'/views');

assuming FILE gives the class file path of your email extension.

Then we can use Yii::app()->controller->render('@email.registration');

What do you think?

4

Ok thanks for the tips.  I'll release the extension soon

Instead of using the @ symbol, would it instead be possible for Yii to auto-detect if the string uses aliases? (eg if the string contains periods?)

5

Yeah, let's go this way.