Question

Does using conditional blocks in my view defeat the purpose of the MVC architecture?

I have a controller method that loads a view and I want to have a different button group based on the page id that was passed as a paramater to that method.

Everything works fine but in my view I have several:

<?php if($pageID == n) : ?>
    html content...
<?php endif; ?>

Is this a bad habit and if so what’s a better solution? Calling a library method from my view seems wrong as well.

Answer 1

There are several ways to avoid that solution, but it really depends on the scale of issue.

A better solution could possibly be something like the follwoing.

View

<?php echo $conditional_html; ?>

Controller

switch($pageID)
{
  case 1:
        $data['conditional_html'] = $this->load->view('the_first_id_html', TRUE);
        break;
  case 4:
  case 7:
  case 8:
        $data['conditional_html'] = $this->load->view('some_special_html', TRUE);
        break;
  case 13:
  case 18:
        $data['conditional_html'] = $this->load->view('the_secret_menu_html', TRUE);
        break;
  default:
    $data['conditional_html'] = $this->load->view('the_default_html', TRUE);
}
$this->load->vars($data);

If you don’t mind loading views within your views, another simpler way of doing it could be like this:

View

<?php $this->load->view($conditional_html); ?>

Controller

switch($pageID)
{
  case 1:
        $data['conditional_html'] = 'the_first_id_html';
        break;
  case 4:
  case 7:
  case 8:
        $data['conditional_html'] = 'some_special_html';
        break;
  case 13:
  case 18:
        $data['conditional_html'] = 'the_secret_menu_html';
        break;
  default:
    $data['conditional_html'] = 'the_default_html':
}
$this->load->vars($data);

In the end, you can do this in many different ways, but I hope this could shed some light on some alternative ways to do it.