• View Templates

The view layer of CakePHP is how you speak to your users. Most of the time your views will be showing
(X)HTML documents to browsers, but you might also need to serve AMF data to a Flash object, reply to a
remote application via SOAP, or output a CSV file for a user.

By default CakePHP view files are written in plain PHP and have a default extension of .ctp (CakePHP Template). These files contain all the presentational logic needed to get the data it received from the controller in a format that is ready for the audience you’re serving to. If you’d prefer using a templating language like Twig, or Smarty, a subclass of View will bridge your templating language and CakePHP.

A view file is stored in /app/View/, in a subfolder named after the controller that uses the file. It has a
filename corresponding to its action. For example, the view file for the Products controller’s “view()” action
would normally be found in /app/View/Products/view.ctp.

The view layer in CakePHP can be made up of a number of different parts. Each part has different uses, and will be covered in this chapter:

• views: Views are the part of the page that is unique to the action being run. They form the meat of your application’s response.
• elements: smaller, reusable bits of view code. Elements are usually rendered inside views.
• layouts: view files that contain presentational code that wraps many interfaces in your application. Most views are rendered inside a layout.
• helpers: these classes encapsulate view logic that is needed in many places in the view layer. Among other things, helpers in CakePHP can help you build forms, build AJAX functionality, paginate model data, or serve RSS feeds.

Extending Views

View extending allows you to wrap one view in another. Combining this with view blocks gives you a
powerful way to keep your views DRY. For example, your application has a sidebar that needs to change
depending on the specific view being rendered. By extending a common view file, you can avoid repeating
the common markup for your sidebar, and only define the parts that change:

// app/View/Common/view.ctp
<h1><?php echo $this->fetch('title'); ?></h1>
<?php echo $this->fetch('content'); ?>
<div class="actions">
<h3>Related actions</h3>
<ul>
<?php echo $this->fetch('sidebar'); ?>
</ul>
</div>

The above view file could be used as a parent view. It expects that the view extending it will define the
sidebar and title blocks. The content block is a special block that CakePHP creates. It will contain
all the uncaptured content from the extending view. Assuming our view file has a $post variable with the
data about our post, the view could look like:

<?php
// app/View/Posts/view.ctp
$this->extend('/Common/view');
$this->assign('title', $post);
$this->start('sidebar');
?>
<li>
<?php
echo $this->Html->link('edit', array(
'action' => 'edit',
$post['Post']['id']
)); ?>
</li>
<?php $this->end(); ?>
// The remaining content will be available as the 'content' block
// in the parent view.
<?php echo h($post['Post']['body']);

The post view above shows how you can extend a view, and populate a set of blocks. Any content not already in a defined block will be captured and put into a special block named content. When a view contains a call to extend(), execution continues to the bottom of the current view file. Once it is complete, the extended view will be rendered. Calling extend() more than once in a view file will override the parent
view that will be processed next:

$this->extend('/Common/view');
$this->extend('/Common/index');

The above will result in /Common/index.ctp being rendered as the parent view to the current view.
You can nest extended views as many times as necessary. Each view can extend another view if desired.
Each parent view will get the previous view’s content as the content block.