ZF Zend Framework

As a simple example, let us say your controller has a list of book data that it wants to have rendered by a view. The controller script might look something like this:

// use a model to get the data for book authors and titles.
$data = array(
    array(
        'author' => 'Hernando de Soto',
        'title' => 'The Mystery of Capitalism'
    ),
    array(
        'author' => 'Henry Hazlitt',
        'title' => 'Economics in One Lesson'
    ),
    array(
        'author' => 'Milton Friedman',
        'title' => 'Free to Choose'
    )
);

// now assign the book data to a Zend_View instance
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_View');
$view = new Zend_View();
$view->books = $data;

// and render a view script called "booklist.php"
echo $view->render('booklist.php');

Now we need the associated view script, "booklist.php". This is a PHP script like any other, with one exception: it executes inside the scope of the Zend_View instance, which means that references to $this point to the Zend_View instance properties and methods. (Variables assigned to the instance by the controller are public properties of the Zend_View instance.) Thus, a very basic view script could look like this:

if ($this->books): ?>

    <!-- A table of some books. -->
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>Author</th>
            <th>Title</th>
        </tr>

        <?php foreach ($this->books as $key => $val): ?>
        <tr>
            <td><?php echo $this->escape($val['author']) ?></td>
            <td><?php echo $this->escape($val['title']) ?></td>
        </tr>
        <?php endforeach; ?>

    </table>

<?php else: ?>

    <p>There are no books to display.</p>

<?php endif;?>

Note how we use the "escape()" method to apply output escaping to variables.

Zend_View has several options that may be set to configure the behaviour of your view scripts.

In our examples and documentation, we make use of PHP short tags: <? and <?=. In addition, we typically use the alternate syntax for control structures. These are convenient shorthands to use when writing view scripts, as they make the constructs more terse, and keep statements on single lines.

That said, many developers prefer to use full tags for purposes of validation or portability. For instance, short_open_tag is disabled in the php.ini.recommended file, and if you template XML in view scripts, short open tags will cause the templates to fail validation.

Additionally, if you use short tags when the setting is off, then the view scripts will either cause errors or simply echo code to the user.

For this latter case, where you wish to use short tags but they are disabled, you have two options:

	View Stream Wrapper Degrades Performance
	Usage of the stream wrapper will degrade performance of your application, though actual benchmarks are unavailable to quantify the amount of degradation. We recommend that you either enable short tags, convert your scripts to use full tags, or have a good partial and/or full page content caching strategy in place.

Typically, you'll only ever need to call on assign(), render(), or one of the methods for setting/adding filter, helper, and script paths. However, if you wish to extend Zend_View yourself, or need access to some of its internals, a number of accessors exist: