Question

I have a class which contains a method to load a view. This works perfect and the page is loaded correctly! The problem I’m having is that I can’t seem to figure out a way to pass variables to the view that my method currently tries to load. How can I go by passing variables to the page? Is there a way I can manipulate my current code to make this work? Or am I going in the complete opposite direction?

Controller Class:

<?php
    class Controller {

        private $args = array();

        public function view($page, $args = null) {

            if ($args !== null) {
                $this->args = $args;
                extract($this->args);
            }

            $page = VIEWS . $page . '.php';
            $template = $this->getTemplate($page);

            echo $template;
        }

        private function getTemplate($file) {
            ob_start();
            include($file);
            $template = ob_get_contents();
            ob_end_clean();
            return $template;
        }
    }
    ?>

Controller:

<?php
    class Page extends Controller {

        public function person($age) {
            $data['age'] = $age;
            $this->view('person', $data);
        }

    }
?>

View Contents:

</h1>My name is Dennis. My age is: <?php echo $age; ?></h1>

The end result is an undefined variable ($age).

Answer 1

The variables which you extract in view() are not available in getTemplate(). It is a different scope. You should instead extract them in the same method that does the rendering.

Also, what you have there is not an MVC view. It’s just a template. A view in MVC is an instance which is responsible for UI logic. It should be requesting the information, that it needs, from model layer and then, if a response is not simply a HTTP location header, creating the HTML using multiple templates.