yii2/docs/guide/structure-views.md

View

Note: This section is under development.

The view component is an important part of MVC. The view acts as the interface to the application, making it responsible for presenting data to end users, displaying forms, and so forth.

Basics

By default, Yii uses PHP in view templates to generate content and elements. A web application view typically contains some combination of HTML, along with PHP echo, foreach, if, and other basic constructs. Using complex PHP code in views is considered to be bad practice. When complex logic and functionality is needed, such code should either be moved to a controller or a widget.

The view is typically called from controller action using the yii\base\Controller::render() method:

public function actionIndex()
{
    return $this->render('index', ['username' => 'samdark']);
}

The first argument to yii\base\Controller::render() is the name of the view to display. In the context of the controller, Yii will search for its views in views/site/ where site is the controller ID. For details on how the view name is resolved, refer to the yii\base\Controller::render() method.

The second argument to yii\base\Controller::render() is a data array of key-value pairs. Through this array, data can be passed to the view, making the value available in the view as a variable named the same as the corresponding key.

The view for the action above would be views/site/index.php and can be something like:

<p>Hello, <?= $username ?>!</p>

Any data type can be passed to the view, including arrays or objects.

Besides the above yii\web\Controller::render() method, the yii\web\Controller class also provides several other rendering methods. Below is a summary of these methods:

• yii\web\Controller::render(): renders a view and applies the layout to the rendering result. This is most commonly used to render a complete page.
• yii\web\Controller::renderPartial(): renders a view without applying any layout. This is often used to render a fragment of a page.
• yii\web\Controller::renderAjax(): renders a view without applying any layout, and injects all registered JS/CSS scripts and files. It is most commonly used to render an HTML output to respond to an AJAX request.
• yii\web\Controller::renderFile(): renders a view file. This is similar to yii\web\Controller::renderPartial() except that it takes the file path of the view instead of the view name.

Widgets

Widgets are self-contained building blocks for your views, a way to combine complex logic, display, and functionality into a single component. A widget:

• May contain advanced PHP programming
• Is typically configurable
• Is often provided data to be displayed
• Returns HTML to be shown within the context of the view

There are a good number of widgets bundled with Yii, such as active form, breadcrumbs, menu, and wrappers around bootstrap component framework. Additionally there are extensions that provide more widgets, such as the official widget for jQueryUI components.

In order to use a widget, your view file would do the following:

// Note that you have to "echo" the result to display it
echo \yii\widgets\Menu::widget(['items' => $items]);

// Passing an array to initialize the object properties
$form = \yii\widgets\ActiveForm::begin([
    'options' => ['class' => 'form-horizontal'],
    'fieldConfig' => ['inputOptions' => ['class' => 'input-xlarge']],
]);
... form inputs here ...
\yii\widgets\ActiveForm::end();

In the first example in the code above, the yii\base\Widget::widget() method is used to invoke a widget that just outputs content. In the second example, yii\base\Widget::begin() and yii\base\Widget::end() are used for a widget that wraps content between method calls with its own output. In case of the form this output is the <form> tag with some properties set.

Security

One of the main security principles is to always escape output. If violated it leads to script execution and, most probably, to cross-site scripting known as XSS leading to leaking of admin passwords, making a user to automatically perform actions etc.

Yii provides a good tool set in order to help you escape your output. The very basic thing to escape is a text without any markup. You can deal with it like the following:

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
?>

<div class="username">
    <?= Html::encode($user->name) ?>
</div>

When you want to render HTML it becomes complex so we're delegating the task to excellent HTMLPurifier library which is wrapped in Yii as a helper yii\helpers\HtmlPurifier:

<?php
use yii\helpers\HtmlPurifier;
?>

<div class="post">
    <?= HtmlPurifier::process($post->text) ?>
</div>

Note that besides HTMLPurifier does excellent job making output safe it's not very fast so consider caching result.

Alternative template languages

There are official extensions for Smarty and Twig. In order to learn more refer to Using template engines section of the guide.

Using View object in templates

An instance of yii\web\View component is available in view templates as $this variable. Using it in templates you can do many useful things including setting page title and meta, registering scripts and accessing the context.

Setting page title

A common place to set page title are view templates. Since we can access view object with $this, setting a title becomes as easy as:

$this->title = 'My page title';

Adding meta tags

Adding meta tags such as encoding, description, keywords is easy with view object as well:

$this->registerMetaTag(['encoding' => 'utf-8']);

The first argument is an map of <meta> tag option names and values. The code above will produce:

<meta encoding="utf-8">

Sometimes there's a need to have only a single tag of a type. In this case you need to specify the second argument:

$this->registerMetaTag(['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'This is my cool website made with Yii!'], 'meta-description');
$this->registerMetaTag(['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'This website is about funny raccoons.'], 'meta-description');

If there are multiple calls with the same value of the second argument (meta-description in this case), the latter will override the former and only a single tag will be rendered:

<meta name="description" content="This website is about funny raccoons.">

Registering link tags

<link> tag is useful in many cases such as customizing favicon, pointing to RSS feed or delegating OpenID to another server. Yii view object has a method to work with these:

$this->registerLinkTag([
    'title' => 'Lives News for Yii Framework',
    'rel' => 'alternate',
    'type' => 'application/rss+xml',
    'href' => 'http://www.yiiframework.com/rss.xml/',
]);

The code above will result in

<link title="Lives News for Yii Framework" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://www.yiiframework.com/rss.xml/" />

Same as with meta tags you can specify additional argument to make sure there's only one link of a type registered.

Registering CSS

You can register CSS using yii\web\View::registerCss() or yii\web\View::registerCssFile(). The former registers a block of CSS code while the latter registers an external CSS file. For example,

$this->registerCss("body { background: #f00; }");

The code above will result in adding the following to the head section of the page:

<style>
body { background: #f00; }
</style>

If you want to specify additional properties of the style tag, pass an array of name-values to the third argument. If you need to make sure there's only a single style tag use fourth argument as was mentioned in meta tags description.

$this->registerCssFile("http://example.com/css/themes/black-and-white.css", [BootstrapAsset::className()], ['media' => 'print'], 'css-print-theme');

The code above will add a link to CSS file to the head section of the page.

• The first argument specifies the CSS file to be registered.
• The second argument specifies that this CSS file depends on yii\bootstrap\BootstrapAsset, meaning it will be added AFTER the CSS files in yii\bootstrap\BootstrapAsset. Without this dependency specification, the relative order between this CSS file and the yii\bootstrap\BootstrapAsset CSS files would be undefined.
• The third argument specifies the attributes for the resulting <link> tag.
• The last argument specifies an ID identifying this CSS file. If it is not provided, the URL of the CSS file will be used instead.

It is highly recommended that you use asset bundles to register external CSS files rather than using yii\web\View::registerCssFile(). Using asset bundles allows you to combine and compress multiple CSS files, which is desirable for high traffic websites.

Registering scripts

With the yii\web\View object you can register scripts. There are two dedicated methods for it: yii\web\View::registerJs() for inline scripts and yii\web\View::registerJsFile() for external scripts. Inline scripts are useful for configuration and dynamically generated code. The method for adding these can be used as follows:

$this->registerJs("var options = ".json_encode($options).";", View::POS_END, 'my-options');

The first argument is the actual JS code we want to insert into the page. The second argument determines where script should be inserted into the page. Possible values are:

• yii\web\View::POS_HEAD for head section.
• yii\web\View::POS_BEGIN for right after opening <body>.
• yii\web\View::POS_END for right before closing </body>.
• yii\web\View::POS_READY for executing code on document ready event. This will register yii\web\JqueryAsset automatically.
• yii\web\View::POS_LOAD for executing code on document load event. This will register yii\web\JqueryAsset automatically.

The last argument is a unique script ID that is used to identify code block and replace existing one with the same ID instead of adding a new one. If you don't provide it, the JS code itself will be used as the ID.

An external script can be added like the following:

$this->registerJsFile('http://example.com/js/main.js', [JqueryAsset::className()]);

The arguments for yii\web\View::registerJsFile() are similar to those for yii\web\View::registerCssFile(). In the above example, we register the main.js file with the dependency on JqueryAsset. This means the main.js file will be added AFTER jquery.js. Without this dependency specification, the relative order between main.js and jquery.js would be undefined.

Like for yii\web\View::registerCssFile(), it is also highly recommended that you use asset bundles to register external JS files rather than using yii\web\View::registerJsFile().

Registering asset bundles

As was mentioned earlier it's preferred to use asset bundles instead of using CSS and JavaScript directly. You can get details on how to define asset bundles in asset manager section of the guide. As for using already defined asset bundle, it's very straightforward:

\frontend\assets\AppAsset::register($this);

Layout

A layout is a very convenient way to represent the part of the page that is common for all or at least for most pages generated by your application. Typically it includes <head> section, footer, main menu and alike elements. You can find a fine example of the layout in a basic application template. Here we'll review the very basic one without any widgets or extra markup.

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
?>
<?php $this->beginPage() ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="<?= Yii::$app->language ?>">
<head>
    <meta charset="<?= Yii::$app->charset ?>"/>
    <title><?= Html::encode($this->title) ?></title>
    <?php $this->head() ?>
</head>
<body>
<?php $this->beginBody() ?>
    <div class="container">
        <?= $content ?>
    </div>
    <footer class="footer">&copy; 2013 me :)</footer>
<?php $this->endBody() ?>
</body>
</html>
<?php $this->endPage() ?>

In the markup above there's some code. First of all, $content is a variable that will contain result of views rendered with controller's $this->render() method.

We are importing yii\helpers\Html helper via standard PHP use statement. This helper is typically used for almost all views where one need to escape outputted data.

Several special methods such as yii\web\View::beginPage()/yii\web\View::endPage(), yii\web\View::head(), yii\web\View::beginBody()/yii\web\View::endBody() are triggering page rendering events that are used for registering scripts, links and process page in many other ways. Always include these in your layout in order for the rendering to work correctly.

By default layout is loaded from views/layouts/main.php. You may change it at controller or module level by setting different value to layout property.

In order to pass data from controller to layout, that you may need for breadcrumbs or similar elements, use view component params property. In controller it can be set as:

$this->view->params['breadcrumbs'][] = 'Contact';

In a view it will be:

$this->params['breadcrumbs'][] = 'Contact';

In layout file the value can be used like the following:

<?= Breadcrumbs::widget([
    'links' => isset($this->params['breadcrumbs']) ? $this->params['breadcrumbs'] : [],
]) ?>

You may also wrap the view render result into a layout using yii\base\View::beginContent(), yii\base\View::endContent(). This approach can be used while applying nested layouts:

<?php $this->beginContent('//layouts/overall') ?>
<div class="content">
    <?= $content ?>
<div>
<?php $this->endContent() ?>

Partials

Often you need to reuse some HTML markup in many views and often it's too simple to create a full-featured widget for it. In this case you may use partials.

Partial is a view as well. It resides in one of directories under views and by convention is often started with _. For example, we need to render a list of user profiles and, at the same time, display individual profile elsewhere.

First we need to define a partial for user profile in _profile.php:

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
?>

<div class="profile">
    <h2><?= Html::encode($username) ?></h2>
    <p><?= Html::encode($tagline) ?></p>
</div>

Then we're using it in index.php view where we display a list of users:

<div class="user-index">
    <?php
    foreach ($users as $user) {
        echo $this->render('_profile', [
            'username' => $user->name,
            'tagline' => $user->tagline,
        ]);
    }
    ?>
</div>

Same way we can reuse it in another view displaying a single user profile:

echo $this->render('_profile', [
    'username' => $user->name,
    'tagline' => $user->tagline,
]);

When you call render() to render a partial in a current view, you may use different formats to refer to the partial. The most commonly used format is the so-called relative view name which is as shown in the above example. The partial view file is relative to the directory containing the current view. If the partial is located under a subdirectory, you should include the subdirectory name in the view name, e.g., public/_profile.

You may use path alias to specify a view, too. For example, @app/views/common/_profile.

And you may also use the so-called absolute view names, e.g., /user/_profile, //user/_profile. An absolute view name starts with a single slashes or double slashes. If it starts with a single slash, the view file will be looked for under the view path of the currently active module. Otherwise, it will will be looked for under the application view path.

Accessing context

Views are generally used either by controller or by widget. In both cases the object that called view rendering is available in the view as $this->context. For example if we need to print out the current internal request route in a view rendered by controller we can use the following:

echo $this->context->getRoute();

Static Pages

If you need to render static pages you can use class ViewAction. It represents an action that displays a view according to a user-specified parameter.

Usage of the class is simple. In your controller use the class via actions method:

class SiteController extends Controller
{
    public function actions()
    {
        return [
            'static' => [
                'class' => '\yii\web\ViewAction',
            ],
        ];
    }

    //...
}

Then create index.php in @app/views/site/pages/:

//index.php
<h1>Hello, I am a static page!</h1>

That's it. Now you can try it using /index.php?r=site/static.

By default, the view being displayed is specified via the view GET parameter. If you open /index.php?r=site/static?&view=about then @app/views/site/pages/about.php view file will be used.

If not changed or specified via GET defaults are the following:

• GET parameter name: view.
• View file used if parameter is missing: index.php.
• Directory where views are stored (viewPrefix): pages.
• Layout for the page rendered matches the one used in controller.

For more information see yii\web\ViewAction.

Caching blocks

To learn about caching of view fragments please refer to caching section of the guide.

Customizing View component

Since view is also an application component named view you can replace it with your own component that extends from yii\base\View or yii\web\View. It can be done via application configuration file such as config/web.php:

return [
    // ...
    'components' => [
        'view' => [
            'class' => 'app\components\View',
        ],
        // ...
    ],
];