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PHP - Concatenating objects and casting to string - bad idea?

Answer 1

+1 A:

You can always use View as a factory object, passing it as string to template with a render() function ( or whatever you'd like to call it ), so the code you have there would look something like;

$this->template->head .= View::factory('custom_javascript')->render()

being rendered the moment before it's passed to template.

Kohana 3 for example uses this pattern to work with views / templates, you can read more about it at unofficial wiki

Kemo 2010-04-10 11:10:14

Thanks Kemo, I'm on Kohana 2.3.4 but the example you've provided will work in that version too. Do you think it's ok practice to use this type of approach in the context of adding controller specific js/css?

franko75 2010-04-10 11:15:09

Answer 2

A:

Seems like wrong approach to me. It's bad idea to construct templates somewhere in controller (judging by your code) by concatenating strings. Better insert all needed blocks directly from teamplate like this:

controller:

// setup template variable
$this->template->var_script = 'custom_javascript';
$this->template->render();

template:

<html>
<head>
<title><?= $title ?></title>
<?= Html::script($var_script) ?>

Sergei 2010-04-10 11:18:35

Answer 3

+1 A:

WTF? You can only concatenate strings - so (assuming it doesn't just throw an error and die) this code will serialize the object before appending it to a string. While you may have a toString() method to generate the HTML, this is not going to work with the 'new' construct - which is not a function.

Presumably you want to generate some html code from the object at some point. In which case you should be something like:

$obj=new View('custom_javascript')
$this->template->head . $obj->generateHtml();

Although creating a whole new object just to wrap a string in some html markup is very wasteful - I'd go with a set of methods for doing this - say...

$this->template->head->addJs('custom_javascript');
$this->template->head->addCSS('make_it_look_funky');
...

C.

symcbean 2010-04-10 13:01:55

Answer 4

A:

Objects with a magic __toString() method are only converted automatically to strings when they're used as strings starting from PHP 5.2.0. In this case, since you use 5.1.6, you must cast the object as a string by hand, so that would be:

$this->template->head .= (string) new View('custom_javascript');

Seldaek 2010-08-24 13:27:12

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