Views

Creating a View
Displaying a View
Loading Multiple Views
Storing Views within Sub-directories
Namespaced Views
Caching Views
Adding Dynamic Data to the View
- The saveData Option
Creating Loops

A view is simply a web page, or a page fragment, like a header, footer, sidebar, etc. In fact, views can flexibly be embedded within other views (within other views, etc.) if you need this type of hierarchy.

Views are never called directly, they must be loaded by a controller. Remember that in an MVC framework, the Controller acts as the traffic cop, so it is responsible for fetching a particular view. If you have not read the Controllers page, you should do so before continuing.

Using the example controller you created in the controller page, let’s add a view to it.

Creating a View 

Using your text editor, create a file called blog_view.php and put this in it:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>My Blog</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Welcome to my Blog!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Then save the file in your app/Views directory.

Displaying a View 

To load and display a particular view file you will use the following function:

<?php

return view('name');

Where name is the name of your view file.

Important

If the file extension is omitted, then the views are expected to end with the .php extension.

Now, open the controller file you made earlier called Blog.php, and replace the echo statement with the view function:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\Controller;

class Blog extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return view('blog_view');
    }
}

If you visit your site using the URL you did earlier you should see your new view. The URL was similar to this:

example.com/index.php/blog/

Loading Multiple Views 

CodeIgniter will intelligently handle multiple calls to view() from within a controller. If more than one call happens they will be appended together. For example, you may wish to have a header view, a menu view, a content view, and a footer view. That might look something like this:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\Controller;

class Page extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $data = [
            'page_title' => 'Your title',
        ];

        return view('header')
            . view('menu')
            . view('content', $data)
            . view('footer');
    }
}

In the example above, we are using “dynamically added data”, which you will see below.

Storing Views within Sub-directories 

Your view files can also be stored within sub-directories if you prefer that type of organization. When doing so you will need to include the directory name loading the view. Example:

<?php

return view('directory_name/file_name');

Namespaced Views 

You can store views under a View directory that is namespaced, and load that view as if it was namespaced. While PHP does not support loading non-class files from a namespace, CodeIgniter provides this feature to make it possible to package your views together in a module-like fashion for easy re-use or distribution.

If you have example/blog directory that has a PSR-4 mapping set up in the Autoloader living under the namespace Example\Blog, you could retrieve view files as if they were namespaced also. Following this example, you could load the blog_view.php file from example/blog/Views by prepending the namespace to the view name:

<?php

return view('Example\Blog\Views\blog_view');

Caching Views 

You can cache a view with the view command by passing a cache option with the number of seconds to cache the view for, in the third parameter:

<?php

// Cache the view for 60 seconds
return view('file_name', $data, ['cache' => 60]);

By default, the view will be cached using the same name as the view file itself. You can customize this by passing along cache_name and the cache ID you wish to use:

<?php

// Cache the view for 60 seconds
return view('file_name', $data, ['cache' => 60, 'cache_name' => 'my_cached_view']);

Adding Dynamic Data to the View 

Data is passed from the controller to the view by way of an array in the second parameter of the view() function. Here’s an example:

<?php

$data = [
    'title'   => 'My title',
    'heading' => 'My Heading',
    'message' => 'My Message',
];

return view('blog_view', $data);

Let’s try it with your controller file. Open it and add this code:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\Controller;

class Blog extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $data['title']   = 'My Real Title';
        $data['heading'] = 'My Real Heading';

        return view('blog_view', $data);
    }
}

Now open your view file and change the text to variables that correspond to the array keys in your data:

<html>
    <head>
        <title><?= esc($title) ?></title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1><?= esc($heading) ?></h1>
    </body>
</html>

Then load the page at the URL you’ve been using and you should see the variables replaced.

The saveData Option 

The data passed in is retained for subsequent calls to view(). If you call the function multiple times in a single request, you will not have to pass the desired data to each view().

But this might not keep any data from “bleeding” into other views, potentially causing issues. If you would prefer to clean the data after one call, you can pass the saveData option into the $option array in the third parameter.

<?php

$data = [
    'title'   => 'My title',
    'heading' => 'My Heading',
    'message' => 'My Message',
];

return view('blog_view', $data, ['saveData' => false]);

Additionally, if you would like the default functionality of the view() function to be that it does clear the data between calls, you can set $saveData to false in app/Config/Views.php.

Creating Loops 

The data array you pass to your view files is not limited to simple variables. You can pass multi dimensional arrays, which can be looped to generate multiple rows. For example, if you pull data from your database it will typically be in the form of a multi-dimensional array.

Here’s a simple example. Add this to your controller:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\Controller;

class Blog extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $data = [
            'todo_list' => ['Clean House', 'Call Mom', 'Run Errands'],
            'title'     => 'My Real Title',
            'heading'   => 'My Real Heading',
        ];

        return view('blog_view', $data);
    }
}

Now open your view file and create a loop:

<html>
<head>
    <title><?= esc($title) ?></title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1><?= esc($heading) ?></h1>

    <h3>My Todo List</h3>

    <ul>
    <?php foreach ($todo_list as $item): ?>

        <li><?= esc($item) ?></li>

    <?php endforeach ?>
    </ul>

</body>
</html>