I suspect that you'd need to extend Zend_View to do that.

Dynamically generated view helpers is a good use-case :) In reality though, I was chatting with Jeremy on IRC and helped him solved his problem :)

Regards,

Rob...

e.g.

Maybe Rob was checking for view helper existence is because he's dynamically generating the helper names ?
Am I right Rob ?

Slavi

i.e.
$ajaxHelper = $this->ajaxSubmission();
$ajaxHelper->setOption('waiterOptions', array('message' => 'Please Wait', 'color' => 'blue', 'et' => 'cetera'));

The second line will call the setOptions method of the Waiter helper if it exists, and if not just encodes it as usual. If it does exist this allows the "target widget" (waiter in this case) to do anything special it needs to with a particular waiter option.

Thanks Rob!

Assuming $this is the view object:

try {
$this->foo();
} catch (Zend_Loader_PluginLoader_Exception $zlpe){
echo "oh noes foo helper is missing";
}

Bonaparte makes a good point, why do you need to check for a helpers existence then conditionally call it. The way I see it, if I'm calling a helper, then I need it to exist. If it doesn't exist, that's an error condition that should be handled. Besides, if the helperExists helper doesn't exist, you're back at square one.

I'm wondering why would anyone want to check if a view helper exists and conditionally call the view helper. :/