How do you enabled layouts for non-HTML templates in Symfony?

Answer 1

Evidently seems this isn't something that can be set globally via YAML (which is sad).

You can set it as stated in the documentation per view, i.e. in view.yml:

indexSuccess:
  layout: layout
  has_layout

But this is pretty laborious if you have many actions and against DRY concepts. Note: Setting the values for all takes no effect.

$this->setLayout('layout')

Does work within an action, but again in my scenario this would need to be set in every action, again not particularly DRY.

Thus, I chose to extend sfActions and bind it into the preExecute method.

class myActions extends sfActions {
  public function execute($request) {
    if($request->getRequestFormat() == 'xml') {
      $this->setLayout('layout');
    }
    return parent::execute($request);
  }
}

Sorts the problem globally if you make sure all your actions extend myActions instead of sfActions, if you want to do it for all formats you could make use of the preExecute method instead, but I wanted to make use of the sfWebRequest to ensure I don't try and force layouts onto prospective other formats I may add such as JSON.

Answer 2

Might this be part of "setting it explicitly for the view"?

$response = $this->getResponse();
$response->setContentType('text/xml');

http://www.symfony-project.org/gentle-introduction/1_4/en/07-Inside-the-View-Layer