Question

I’m working on a CakePHP 1.2 app where I don’t have control over the /app directory and have relocated my views folder to, say /path/to/mycomponent/views and can render my views by setting my controller’s default view path

var $viewPath = "mycomponent/views";

I have some layouts (including basic.ctp) under /path/to/mycomponent/views/layouts

Is there a way to render my views inside a specific layout?

Calling this from my controller gives me a page not found error:

function index()
    {
        $this->autoLayout = true;
        $this->pageTitle = 'Browse items';
        $this->render("browse", "basic");
        // also tried: $this->render("browse", "/path/to/mycomponent/views/layouts/basic.ctp");
    }

Answer 1

Finally got it to work by adding a path to the viewPaths array of the app configuration. This code goes in you controller constructor or in the override beforeFilter metod:

$config = Configure::getInstance();
$config->viewPaths[] = " /path/to/mycomponent/views/";

Now I can just specify the following:

$this->layout = 'basic';

And my controller’s views render in the basic.ctp layout.