Views

A view is a page that is viewed by the visitor. The views should contain as little programming logic as possible. That responsibility lays with the controller that is loading the view by instructions from the router.

The views are located in the ~/public/views folder. This folder contains the pages that your application has, including the error pages (404-pages and such) and authentication pages.

Loading a view

When a request to load a page, for instance /about, is made, the router decides how to handle that request. The about page could have a controller that would collect information from a database and then use the App::view() method to load the page and pass the database data. It is however not necessary to have a controller if the controller's only task is to load a view. See the examples below.

// In the router:
$Router->get('/about', [AboutController::class, 'index']);

// In the AboutController:
public static function index() {
    return App::view('about.php');
}

// In the router:
$Router->get('/about', function() {
    return App::view('about.php');
});

We can however also pass attributes with the view() method. By processing data in the controller or model and then pass it to the view, the view is not cluttered with a lot of PHP code. The second argument of the view() method is an array:

public static function index() {
    // Get all users as an array
    $usersList = User::get();

    return App::view('users.php', [
        'users' => $usersList
    ]);
}

The key 'users' is extracted and made into a variable $users that the view can use.

<ul>
    <?php foreach ($users as $user) : ?>
        <li>User name: <?= $user['name'] ?></li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

We can also use the view() helper function in the same manner should it be needed as it uses the App::view() method.

If we need to access the views folder within our code, we can use the VIEWS constant:

echo VIEWS; // $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . APP_FOLDER . '/public/views'

Partials

To load recurring elements in a view, such as the HTML head, a sidebar or a navigation we use what is called "partials". A partial is a snippet of code that can be included in a view. The partials files are located in the ~/public/partials folder.

To load a partial you pass the partial name (without file extension) in the parial() helper function. This code will load the file ´page-head.php´ from the ~/public/partials folder:

<?php partial('page-head') ?>

If you happen to use a file extension that is not ".php", you can change this with the constant DEFAULT_FILE_EXTENSION in the ~/config/config.php file.

Other partials that are included with Beets PHP by default are:

• copyright
• footer
• navigation
• page-foot
• page-head
• sidebar

This is how a complete view can look like:

<?php partial('page-head') ?>
<?php partial('sidebar') ?>

<main class="bl__main"> 
    <?php partial('navigation') ?>

    <div class="bl__body container-xl">
        <h1 class="page-title">About</h1>

        // Page content
    </div>
</main>

<?php partial('page-foot') ?>

If we need to access the partials folder within our code, we can use the PARTIALS constant:

echo PARTIALS; // $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . APP_FOLDER . '/public/partials'