Using smarty in plugins

R_J

(Poor mans split from here)

@R_J said:

@hgtonight said:
The development version even has support for adding it via tpl files.

Interesting! I recently tried to use Smarty in a plugin but failed because I saw now way of adding variables to Smarty. That's why I was just before making a pull request on GitHub for class.smarty.php:

class Gdn_Smarty {
...
    public function assign($key, $value = '') {
        $smarty = $this->smarty();
        $smarty->assign($key, $value);
    }

How could I use Smarty without that method?

@peregrine said:
not sure what you are after.

just add name to the call in the tpl

$Name = GetValue('name', $Params);

To my understanding Smarty is all about being able to replace such a view:

<h1><?php echo $this->data('Title'); ?></h1>
<p><?php echo $this->data('SomethingMeaningful'); ?></p>

with such a template

<h1>{$Title}</h1>
<p>{$SomethingMeaningful}</p>

So I've put the above in plugins/smartytest/views/smartytest.tpl and used a plugin with following method:

    public function vanillaController_smartytest_create($sender, $args) {
        $sender->masterView();
        // Add modules.
        foreach (c('Modules.Vanilla.Panel') as $module) {
            if ($module != 'MeModule') {
                $sender->addModule($module);
            }
        }
        $smarty = new Gdn_Smarty();

        // This only works with a tweaked smarty class...
        $smarty->assign('Title', 'JUHU');
        $smarty->assign('SomethingMeaningful', 'You bet!');

        $sender->render($this->getView('smartytest.tpl'));
    }

That works exactly as I wanted it to (and as I would expect it). Downside is, there is no such assign()function in class.smarty.php and that's why I had to add it.

If I had more time for it, I already would have filed a PR. But now I thought maybe hgtonight knows a way to assign variables to the smarty object. That's why I was curious. Otherwise I'm eager to file this PR. You know: I'm like a collector and like to see my avatar above all those files on GitHub and I guess that's the best opportunity to appear in the smarty class!

hgtonight

You want to expose variables to Smarty templates?

You should be able to hook into the Gdn_Smarty_Init_Handler($sender) and assign directly to the $sender smarty object.

R_J

I'm such an idiot (sometimes)! And now I'm happy I didn't made a PR

1. My assign function is not doing anything more useful than simply using the already existing smarty() function to expose an already public available function. So it would only be a shortcut for $smarty->smarty()->assign(...)
2. I found that everything I set with $sender->setData($key, $value) is assigned to Smarty during the classes init function. So I must only be sure I set it before smarty is initialized. So I could rely on the Garden convention of setData and I'm not bound to Smarty specific syntaxes
3. The smarty class is initialized for the render process anyway, so I do not need to initialize it anywhere manually. The code above comes down to

public function vanillaController_smartytest_create($sender, $args) {
    $sender->masterView();
    // Add modules.
    foreach (c('Modules.Vanilla.Panel') as $module) {
        if ($module != 'MeModule') {
            $sender->addModule($module);
        }
    }
    // Not needed!
    // $smarty = new Gdn_Smarty();

    // This only works with a tweaked smarty class...
    // $smarty->assign('Title', 'JUHU');
    // $smarty->assign('SomethingMeaningful', 'You bet!');

    // .. but it is unneeded anyway since you can use Garden functionality
    $sender->setData('Title', 'JUHU');
    $sender->setData('SomethingMeaningful', 'You bet!');

    $sender->render($this->getView('smartytest.tpl'));
}

That way you can switch between php views and Smarty templates by only changing the filename to render. That's really comfortable!