Question

I’m using Doctrine2 and CodeIgniter2, and am new to both, as well as to OOP/MVC, so please use simple explanations 🙂

For testing purposes, I have a Controller a Model and a View. I want to display data from a table that contains user information. First name, last name, ID number, and so forth.

My controller makes a call to the model- which retrieves data from the doctrine entity, and then the controller passes that data to the view.

(controller)

class Test_v_to_m extends CI_Controller {

    public function index() {

        $this->load->model('testing/test_v_to_m_model');
        $data = $this->test_v_to_m_model->display_user_info();

        $this->load->view('testing/test_v_to_m_view', $data );
    }
}

(model)

class Test_v_to_m_model extends CI_Model{

public function display_user_name() {

    $query = $this->doctrine->em->createQuery("select u from ORM\Dynasties2\Users u");
    return $query->getResult();

(view)

//print_r($data);

First question is: How do I pass the object or array along to the view in a useful way? This works if I’m just dealing with a single variable:

(controller)

$user = $this->doctrine->em->find('Entities\User', $user_id);
$data['firstname'] = $user->getFirstName();
$this->load->view('testing/test_v_to_c_view_2',$data);

(view)

echo $firstname;

But I don’t know how to do something similar when its an array, or a multidimensional array.

The second question is whether or not to let the view do any real work (php logic, loops, foreach, etc) or to do all of that in the controller and have the view only do formatting and display.

Answer 1

Yes, You can just pass multi-dimensional array to the view and then access it as required.
e.g.

$template_date['result_arr'] = array(
array('firstname' => 'abc', 'lastname' => 'xyz')
, array('firstname' => 'abc', 'lastname' => 'xyz')
);

in your view file –

foreach($result_arr as $key => $row) {
echo $row['firstname'].' <br />';
}

Re your 2nd question – As per my understanding – it’s fine to use some foreach, for loops in the view but it’s best if business logic is kept to controllers and models. Hope it makes sense to you.