I have controller PlayerController and actions inside: View, Info, List.
So on urls "/Player/View" i get result with default Layout.
I want to get result with different Layout on request "/External/View".
How can i achieve this?
Although you can override the layout from the controller as has been suggested in another answer, in my opinion this means the controllers are getting just too involved in determining what the UI will be. Best to leave this purely to the Views to decide.
The closest to what you're asking is to do this in your current "~/Views/_ViewStart.cshtml":
#{
if(Context.Request.Path.StartsWith("/External", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
Layout = "~/Views/_ExternalLayout.cshtml";
else
Layout = "~/Views/_Layout.cshtml";
}
Where "~/Views/_ExternalLayout.cshtml" is your alternative layout.
Might want to check the leading "/" is correct on there, I can't remember if it is.
If you put this in the existing _ViewStart, then any view that is being rendering in response to a url starting with "/External" will use this new layout, otherwise the 'normal' one will be used.
Another approach is to use the routing table to add a route value that can be used here to make a layout decision; but I've gone for this approach to keep it simple.
You can specify which layout should be used when returning a view inside your 'ExternalController' controller action.
return View("View", "~/Views/Shared/_AnotherLayout.cshtml")
Related
I'm a developer and I am very confident with MVC pattern and have already developed a lot of webapp from scratch using php framework like symfony or yii.
I'm a little bit confused about joomla mvc and terminology and after googling a lot, read joomla book extensions guide, read on joomla website my doubt are still there.
What is confusing for me is the component mvc structure and how I have to set up "my way of think" about joomla mvc, for doing the things in the joomla way.
In particular I am used to reasoning in terms of controller/action (like in symfony and yii framework)
So the final list of all my webapp url will be
controller1/action1
controller1/action2
controller1/action3
controller2/action1
controller2/action2
Each controller's action will decide what view to render and what layout to use for showing the view.
In particular in these frameworks, the definition of a layout is exactly the mean of a layout. And the view is the "core part" of the page.
So I can have a view with a list of users and I can put this view inside a mobile layout or a desktop layout, or to build a view for mobile and put it only in the mobile layout and so on.
The final result about directory structure in my webapp is something similar to the following:
controllers/
controller1
controller2
controller3
models/
modelForTableA
modelForTableB
views/
controller1/
viewForAction1
viewForAction2
layouts/
mobileLayout.php
desktopLayout.php
and for me is very clear to understand.
So finally my questions are:
how would be the directory structure in joomla?
what are in joomla the definition of view, layout and task?
I need to clarify that I do not need an explaination about MVC works in general, but if I would achieve the same result as before, how I have to organize my code and my work?
Suppose that I want to build a component with the following "url"
userController/addUser
userController/editUser
userController/listUsers
userController/viewUserDetail
anotherController/addOperation
anotherController/editOperation
anotherController/myNonCrudOperation
Thank you very much
Routing in Joomla is slightly different. The SEF URLs are built from menu items, which in turn point to a View/Layout combination.
This turns things around: a controller is not bound to a specific View/Layout.
Let's make an example of the flow with the addUser functionality you mentioned as an example; I'll be referring to these files (but you'll have plenty more):
/controllers/user.php
/models/user.php
/views/useradd/view.html.php
/views/useradd/tmpl/default.php
/views/useradd/tmpl/default.xml
/controller.php
/router.php
As you can see the layouts are inside each view's tmpl folder.
router.php
Let's start from this last file: router.php defines our custom SEF rules so, after Joomla passes the call to our component (usually with the params
?option=com_componentname) we can takeover and interpret the URL as we wish. It is a bit hard to get started with but does provide the most flexibility and power. We don't really need to implement it at all for this simple example: so back to our registration now.
First step: show the "new user" form.
You would typically bind this to a menu item, pointing to the /views/useradd/tmpl/default.php; the /views/useradd/tmpl/default.xml contains the definition of the layout so it's available in the menu manager. Very often there is only one layout per view.
Control is passed to the view /views/useradd/view.html.php , and the view will then load an instance of its own model (automatically chosen based on the view name, you can load other models of course) to gather any initialization data.
The view then renders the layout, and presents it to the user.
The layout's responsibility includes generating a form with an appropriate action (endpoint) and security tokens if appropriate:
<form action="index.php?option=com_mycomponent">
<input type="hidden" task="user.save">
<?php echo JHtml::_('form.token');?>
as you see it doesn't really matter if you want to use <input or params on the url, and you can most often mix them.
Form interaction
For autocompletion the form may need to invoke some backend controller methods, i.e. the method emailAvailable() in the /controllers/user.php
It does not make sense to have such functionality indexed, so we'll invoke the method directly with a non-SEF url:
index.php?option=com_ourcomponent&task=user.emailAvailable
followed by any other parameter. This will work in both get and post.
The controller /controllers/user.php's emailAvailable() method will return a json structure and then invoke exit() as we don't want the CMS to kick in at all. An alternative solution is to add the param &format=json in the call.
{"email":"johndoe#example.com", "available":true}
Saving the data
When the user submits the form, processing is first handled by the controller since a task is specified. (see above task=user.save). Joomla will invoke the method save() in the controller /controllers/user.php.
This time, however, our controller is responsible for returning information to the user. After processing the data, it may choose to re-render the registration form showing an error, or a thank you page. In either case the controller simply sets the redirect, letting Joomla handle the rendering when appropriate.
$this->setRedirect(JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&view=useradd', false));
More control
Each time a controller task is not specified, the display() method of the main controller is invoked. You can add custom logic there.
Joomla fires several events during a view rendering; these can be intercepted by a system plugin or - if you add in the calls - other kinds of plugins as well. You may even create your own types of plugins. Do not try to instantiate a view manually from a controller, as this may inhibit plugin firing.
Small insight,
1) Directory Structure
controllers/
controller1
controller2
controller3
models/
modelForTableA
modelForTableB
views/
layout1
2) View and layout and task
check this answer
3) More routing techniques with SEF.
Hope it helps.
solved with this. I cannot delete this question because there already exists other answer.
Could any moderator close or delete this? Thank you
https://joomla.stackexchange.com/questions/18774/joomla-terminology-view-layout-task-and-component-development/18799#18799
Are it in any way possible to execute another action in the same on in another controller from an action, action filter or in any other way without doing a physical redirect.
The reason for this is that I have a dynamic paging system, where the user will load a url, for an example
/1/some-page-title
This url is maped to the controller “Home” and the action “Element”, this action will then load a row from the database where the element id is “1”. Depending from the data on the element from the database will the page be rendered as a contact form, an image gallery and so on.
Now I could map the paths so
/Page/1/some-title/ will render a normal html page,
/Contact/1/some-title/ will render a contact form
/Gallery/1/some-title/ will render a gallery
But I would prefer the paths to be simple.
There are problems with this answer, it's been a long time since I did anything thing with ASP MVC, so I'm not actually aware of what the problems are.
Unfortunately I can't delete an accepted answer.
So, I'm striking through the answer as it was, if you can actually answer this, or make it better, please do so.
Yes, very simple really :)
Say you're in controller C action A. You want to "redirect" to controller B action Z, just call the other controller action from the current one, returning it's result.
public ActionResult A()
{
return B.Z()
}
You may be looking for Html.RenderAction or Html.Action. However, these are used in the view and not the controller.
I'm currently putting together a multi-tenancy web app using MVC 3. At least 30 different Web sites will share a common codebase, and while also sharing similar under-the-hood functionality, they are need to look significantly different. As a consequence I'm using the URL to internally separate out clients, and an overridden Razor view engine (at least in terms of finding the view) to automatically select either a customised view for a given action, or the default view.
To help 'compartmentalise' a complex page, any particular view will make use of several partials, usually rendered as self-contained actions, so that generally a custom view or partial view will only have small HTML differences, helping to minimise any code specific to a client's site.
I hope you followed that background!
So one HTML page might be made up of lots of little smatterings of HTML partial views, which could come from specific folders for the client, or a general-purpose version. I'm hoping to make it easier for our designer to make minor changes to a page by easily seeing where in the folder structure the bit of HTML he wants to change are.
My proposal then is that each partial will be 'bracketed' with HTML comments such as:
{ Content of partial }
Obviously I could put these in manually, but that's just asking for trouble, for typos, for copied and then modified client versions not being updated with the correct URL. It should be possible to get this from some context and inject it, I think.
At the same time, I need to be able to not do this for certain Actions. Eg, a partial might be generating text inside a textarea, say, so the comments wouldn't be appropriate there. On the whole I'm happy to put these comments in unless I specify that it's not appropriate.
For me this suggests an ActionFilter on an Action, which I can apply site wide and then turn off for certain Actions. I'd hope that one of the overridable events would let me ascertain this path, but I can't seem to find anywhere it's stored. Furthermore, OnResultExecuting seems to fire before the Partial has been selected, and OnResultExecuted seems to have already written out the contents of the Partial, so I can't insert the starting comment here. I also can't find any reference to the path of the selected partial.
Just for completeness, it's my intention that this attribute would only write these comments when compiled in Debug mode.
So, does anyone know how I might be able to get the path to the selected View without any kind of hack between FindPartialView and the Attribute? Is my Attribute method the best choice or is there an easier way to do this? Perhaps something's built in already!
Many thanks for your help.
Well, I've never forgotten about wanting this, and always hoped I'd solve it one day, and thankfully I have.
I've overridden the default WebViewPage (I use the Razor engine), and in particular ExecutePageHierarchy to inject the comments:
public abstract class PaladinWebViewPage : PaladinWebViewPage<dynamic>
{
}
public abstract class PaladinWebViewPage<TModel> : WebViewPage<TModel>
{
public bool DisplaySourceCodeComments
{
get { return ((bool?) ViewBag.__DisplaySourceCodeComments) ?? false; }
set { ViewBag.__DisplaySourceCodeComments = value; }
}
public override void ExecutePageHierarchy()
{
base.ExecutePageHierarchy();
// Filters can be used to set and clear this value so we can decide when to show this comment
if (!DisplaySourceCodeComments) return;
var sw = Output as StringWriter;
if (sw == null) return;
var sb = sw.GetStringBuilder();
sb.Insert(0, string.Format("<!-- Start of {0} -->", VirtualPath));
sb.AppendFormat("<!-- End of {0} -->", VirtualPath);
}
VirtualPath tells us the exact file used to build the HTML, so we can inject the filename before and after. This isn't doing anything at the moment, since the default is to not show comments (the "?? false" in DisplaySourceCodeComments).
Also to use this view page you need to edit Views/Web.config and change the pageBaseType to this type.
I want to selectively turn these comments on and off so I've created an ActionFilter:
public class DisplaySourceCodeCommentsAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
private readonly bool _displaceSourceCodeComments;
public DisplaySourceCodeCommentsAttribute(bool displaceSourceCodeComments)
{
_displaceSourceCodeComments = displaceSourceCodeComments;
}
public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
{
base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
var viewResult = filterContext.Result as ViewResultBase;
if (viewResult == null) return;
viewResult.ViewBag.__DisplaySourceCodeComments = _displaceSourceCodeComments;
}
}
I'm slightly unhappy that I've had to use the ViewBag here and also separately in the view page override, as they aren't tightly linked, but I can't find a way for the filter to directly interact with the view page, so this is something of a necessary fudge. It does have the benefit that displaying source code for a view or partial also automatically displays it for any child partials until you turn it off again, since the ViewBag is passed down the chain.
With this in place, any action can turn on the source code comments with
[DisplaySourceCodeComments(true)]
or, obviously turn it off again with false
The Attribute checks that the context result is a ViewResultBase, which means just Views and Partials, so Json or Content or redirects aren't affected, which is very handy too.
Finally, I make this action filter a global when running in debug mode so that every view, and partial has the source comment included, by adding the following line to global.asax.cs:
[#]if DEBUG
// When in debug mode include HTML comments showing where a view or partial has come from
GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new DisplaySourceCodeCommentsAttribute(true));
[#]endif
I'm really happy I've finally got it sorted so I hope this is useful for someone else.
I know how to use Zend_Acl to allow certain resources to certain usergroups but how do i use it to allow only specific parts of the page to be shown? For example
I have a button to delete a post via AJAX on the page but i only want to show the button to Admins only. I can use Zend_Acl to block access to the controller post/delete but i can't use it to block the button from showing.
// in controller
$this->view->allow_delete_post = $acl->isAllowed($role, 'delete_post');
.
// in template
<? if ($this->allow_delete_post): ?>[button html]<? endif; ?>
Would that not do it?
You can also write a custom static ACL class which you can then call directly from within your view script.
Since ACL is normally handled at plugin level it means that if your visitor is seeing the view then ACL has already allowed the resource, therefor inside your view you can now do something like this...
if(My_Custom_Acl::getIsAllowed('some_resource', 'delete_post_action'){
I did not specify the role name in the custom getIsAllowed() method, because at this point ACL is already suppose to know the user's Identity and the Role.
Hope this helps
Although Christof gave a good solution, an alternative is to split the views. Although this starts to violate DRY, when you have about 200 different admin things/controls, it's getting heavy in the view - thus splitting the view with $this->render('view') and $this->render('edit') for permissions from the controller is sometimes easier. Then only the edit view script has the edit links. But again, it's DRY, so not optimal, but an alternative. I guess you have to weigh it up, which one is more DRY, repeating the ACL check or the stuff in 2 views...
When using the MVC design pattern I usually try to make my view files as simple as possible.
Therefore in my View I try not to have lots of code like this:
if page title exists
display page title
else
display 'default page title'
end if
Instead, in my Controller I might use code like this:
if no page title is specified
page title = 'default page title'
end if
load the view (pass page title as a parameter)
Is this the best way to tackle this issue?
Keeping this if-else condition in the controller level is a better idea than moving into views. (if you can otherwise it's alright)
It will make your views look good !!!!