Question

It would be nice to be able to format a url in a portable way inside of a controller, for example for a JSON response. Is there an easy way to do this without creating an instance of Zend_View first?

Answer 1

If saying “format URL” you meaning create an url from params, url view helper is you answer. You use it in controller the same way as in view and don’t need to create new Zend_View instance – if you’re using view renderer you have your helper in $this->view. So

//in view
$this->url(array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'default'));

//in controller
$this->view->url(array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'default'));

But if you look into code of url view helper, you’ll see, that it’s using router object to assemble routes/url/. So all you need is router object, which you can obtain in several ways, some of them:

//in controller
$router = $this->getFrontController()->getRouter();
//anywhere
$router = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter();
//and then
$router->assemble(array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'default'));

You can also use HelperBroker, retrieve viewRenderer from there, retrieve a view and run helper method.