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Why we just load views from files? - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: Why we just load views from files? (/showthread.php?tid=25332)

Why we just load views from files? - El Forum - 12-08-2009

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hello, there. I'm new to CI and I have a good (in my view) question.

Why we just load views from files? I mean, if you take a look at some template systems, like Smarty, you can see that they let you load (or include) templates from a variety of sources (for example, from a database). In CodeIgniter we don't have it. Views (that can be considered as some kind of templates) are just stored and loaded from files.

I'm working on a small CMS that is inspired by Ruby's Radiant CMS. And it let the user create and edit layouts and snippets. Layouts are a little like views, but they're stored on the database. So, I've done the following adaptation, just cutting some parts from original CI_Loader class.

Code:
class MY_Loader extends CI_Loader
{
    function _ci_load_buffer($_ci_data)
    {
        foreach (array('_ci_buffer', '_ci_vars', '_ci_return') as $_ci_val)
        {
            $$_ci_val = ( ! isset($_ci_data[$_ci_val])) ? FALSE : $_ci_data[$_ci_val];
        }
    
        if ($this->_ci_is_instance())
        {
            $_ci_CI =& get_instance();
            foreach (get_object_vars($_ci_CI) as $_ci_key => $_ci_var)
            {
                if ( ! isset($this->$_ci_key))
                {
                    $this->$_ci_key =& $_ci_CI->$_ci_key;
                }
            }
        }

        if (is_array($_ci_vars))
        {
            $this->_ci_cached_vars = array_merge($this->_ci_cached_vars, $_ci_vars);
        }
        extract($this->_ci_cached_vars);
                
        ob_start();
                
        if ((bool) @ini_get('short_open_tag') === FALSE AND config_item('rewrite_short_tags') == TRUE)
        {
            echo eval('?>'.preg_replace("/;*\s*\?>/", "; ?>", str_replace('<?=', '<?php echo ', $_ci_buffer)));
        }
        else
        {
            echo eval('?>'.$_ci_buffer);
        }
        
        log_message('debug', 'Buffer loaded: \''.substr($_ci_buffer, 0, 32).'...\'');
        
        if ($_ci_return === TRUE)
        {        
            $buffer = ob_get_contents();
            @ob_end_clean();
            return $buffer;
        }

        if (ob_get_level() > $this->_ci_ob_level + 1)
        {
            ob_end_flush();
        }
        else
        {
            global $OUT;
            $OUT->append_output(ob_get_contents());
            @ob_end_clean();
        }
    }
}

That function works like _ci_load one, but instead of loading from a file, loads from a string buffer. Now I can retrieve a layout from a database and treat and load that as a normal view.

As I'm new to CI, I wonder if that was a good solution and I ask you guys, that are more experienced.

Thank you,
Dirley Rodrigues

Why we just load views from files? - El Forum - 12-08-2009

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
If it works and it's not buggy, it's a good solution!

EE 2.0 has functionality similar to this, so that functionality could be moved into CodeIgniter at some point. We'll have to wait and see.