In Yii, we can enclose content into a decorator. The common usage of decorators is layout. When you are rendering a view using the render method of your controller, Yii automatically decorates it with the main layout. Let's create a simple decorator that will properly format quotes.
Create a new application using the Composer package manager, as described in the official guide at http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-start-installation.html.
- First, we will create a decorator file,
@app/views/decorators/quote.php:<div class="quote"> <h2>“<?= $content?>”, <?= $author?></h2> </div> - Now, replace the content of
@app/views/site/index.phpwith the following code:<?php use yiiwidgetsContentDecorator; /* @var */ ?> <?php ContentDecorator::begin([ 'viewFile' => '@app/views/decorators/quote.php', 'view' => $this, 'params' => ['author' => 'S. Freud'] ] );?> Time spent with cats is never wasted. <?php ContentDecorator::end();?> - Now, your Home page should look like the following:
Decorators are pretty simple. Everything between ContentDecorator::begin()
and ContentDecorator::end()
is rendered into a $content variable and passed into a decorator template. Then, the decorator template is rendered and inserted in the place where ContentDecorator::end()
was called.
We can pass additional variables into the decorator template using a second parameter of ContentDecorator::begin(), such as the one we did for the author.
Note that we have used @app/views/decorators/quot
e.php as the view path.
- The http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/yii-widgets-contentdecorator.html URL provides more details about decorators:
- The Using the controller context in a view recipe