Using your own View object with Zend_Application

Let’s say that you want to use your own view object within your Zend Framework application.

Creating the view object is easy enough in library/App/View.php:

class App_View extends Zend_View
{
// custom methods here
}

along with adding the App_ namespace to the the autoloader in application.ini:
autoloadernamespaces[] = "App_"

All we need to now is get Zend_Application to bootstrap with our new view class. There are two ways of doing this: within Bootstrap.php or using a custom resource.

_initView() in Bootstrap.php

At first blush, the code looks quite easy. In application/Bootstrap.php, we add our own method that creates the view object and assigns it to the viewRenderer:


class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{
protected function _initView()
{
$view = new App_View();

$viewRenderer = new Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer();
$viewRenderer->setView($view);
Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewRenderer);
return $view;
}
}

As we have named the method _initView(), our method will take precedence over the built in View resource and be used instead. However, this implementation will ignore any view options that are configured in application.ini using the resources.view key, so a better method is this:

class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{
protected function _initView()
{
$resources = $this->getOption('resources');
$options = array();
if (isset($resources['view'])) {
$options = $resources['view'];
}
$view = new App_View($options);

if (isset($options['doctype'])) {
$view->doctype()->setDoctype(strtoupper($options['doctype']));
if (isset($options['charset']) && $view->doctype()->isHtml5()) {
$view->headMeta()->setCharset($options['charset']);
}
}
if (isset($options['contentType'])) {
$view->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', $options['contentType']);
}

$viewRenderer = new Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer();
$viewRenderer->setView($view);
Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewRenderer);
return $view;
}

}

This version takes into account your configuration settings and behaves the same as the View resource provided by Zend Framework. The only difference is that we’re now using App_View.

Custom resource

Another option is to override Zend_Application_Resource_View with our own view resource. In this case, we create a class called App_Resource_View stored in library/App/Resource/View.php. We only need to override one method, getView():

class App_Resource_View extends Zend_Application_Resource_View
{
public function getView()
{
if (null === $this->_view) {
$options = $this->getOptions();
$this->_view = new App_View($options);

if (isset($options['doctype'])) {
$this->_view->doctype()->setDoctype(strtoupper($options['doctype']));
if (isset($options['charset']) && $this->_view->doctype()->isHtml5()) {
$this->_view->headMeta()->setCharset($options['charset']);
}
}
if (isset($options['contentType'])) {
$this->_view->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', $options['contentType']);
}
}
return $this->_view;
}
}

Essentially, all I have done is replace the class of the view object to be App_View and left everything else alone so that it behaves the same as the default View resource.

To get Zend_Application to load our custom resource, we just add one line to application.ini:

pluginPaths.App_Resource = "App/Resource"

We now have a reusable resource that will load our own View class and can easily take it from project to project.