Pádraic Brady is back today with the latest installment (part 5!) of his look at complex views in the Zend Framework. This time, her focuses on something called the Two-Step Pattern - a pattern similar to the Layouts pattern.

Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).

He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.

He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.

Pádraic Brady is back today with the latest installment (part 5!) of his look at complex views in the Zend Framework. This time, her focuses on something called the Two-Step Pattern - a pattern similar to the Layouts pattern.

Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).

He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.

He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.