Yii View Rendering Library

This library provides templates rendering abstraction supporting layout-view-subview hierarchy, custom renderers with PHP-based as default, and more. It's used in Yii Framework but is usable separately.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or higher.

Installation

The package could be installed with Composer:

composer require yiisoft/view

General usage

The package provides two use cases for managing view templates:

• Basic functionality for use in any environment.
• Advanced functionality for use in a web environment.

State of View and WebView services

While being immutable and, by itself, stateless, both View and WebView services have sets of stateful and mutable data.

View service:

• parameters,
• blocks,
• theme,
• locale.

WebView service:

• parameters,
• blocks,
• theme,
• locale,
• title,
• meta and link tags,
• JS/CSS strings,
• JS/CSS files.

The state of View and WebView isn't cloned when the services are cloned. So when using with*(), both new and old instances are sharing the same set of stateful mutable data. It allows, for example, to get WebView via type-hinting in a controller and change context path:

final class BlogController {
    private WebView $view;
    public function __construct (WebView $view) {
        $this->view = $view->withContextPath(__DIR__.'/views');
    }
}

and then register CSS in a widget:

final class LastPosts extends Widget 
{    
    private WebView $view;
    public function __construct (WebView $view) {
        $this->view = $view;
    }
    protected function run(): string
    {
        ...
        $this->view->registerCss('.lastPosts { background: #f1f1f1; }');
        ...
    }
}

Locale state

You can change the locale by using setLocale(), which will be applied to all other instances that used current state including existing ones. If you need to change the locale only for a single instance, you can use the immutable withLocale() method. Locale will be applied to all views rendered within views with render() calls.

Example with mutable method:

final class LocaleMiddleware implements MiddlewareInterface
{    
    ...
    private WebView $view;
    ...
    public function __construct (
        ...
        WebView $view
        ...
    ) {
        $this->view = $view;
    }
    public function process(ServerRequestInterface $request, RequestHandlerInterface $handler): ResponseInterface
    {
        ...
        $this->view->setLocale($locale);
        ...
    }
}

Example with immutable method:

final class BlogController {
    private WebView $view;
    public function __construct (WebView $view) {
        $this->view = $view;
    }
    public function index() {
        return $this->view->withLocale('es')->render('index');
    }
}

Reset state

To get a deep cloned View or WebView use withClearedState():

$view = $view->withClearedState();

Extensions

• Yii View Renderer - a wrapper that's used in Yii Framework. Adds extra functionality for a web environment and compatibility with PSR-7 interfaces.
• yiisoft/view-twig - an extension that provides a view renderer that will allow you to use the Twig view template engine, instead of the default PHP renderer.

Documentation

• Guide: English, Português - Brasil
• Internals

If you need help or have a question, the Yii Forum is a good place for that. You may also check out other Yii Community Resources.

License

The Yii View Rendering Library is free software. It's released under the terms of the BSD License. Please see LICENSE for more information.

Maintained by Yii Software.

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