Coding Controllers and Views for the HMVC Design Pattern - Completing the MVC triads

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In the preceding section, I defined the controller classes responsible for fetching links and news headlines from the corresponding models. Now, the next step that I’m going to take will consist of building the view files that render that data within different sections of an HTML page.

First, here’s the template file that displays the link bar of the web page in question:

(links.php)

 

 

<div id="navbar">

<?php if (empty($links)):?>

    <h2>You cannot navigate this site!</h2>

<?php else:?>

    <ul>

    <?php foreach($links as $link):?>

        <li><a href="<?php echo $link->href;?>"><?php echo $link->text;?></a></li>

    <?php endforeach?>

    </ul>

<?php endif?>

</div>

That was really easy to code, wasn’t it? Now that you can see how this first view file looks, I guess that you’ll have a clearer idea of how it fits into the schema of an MVC triad. As seen above, this template file will render only the navigation bar of the web page by using the data passed by the “LinksController” class, which at this time, uses its associated model to access the corresponding MySQL table.

On the other hand, the following view will display the main section of the web page, which will contain some fictional news:  

(news.php)

 

 

<div id="newscontainer">

<?php if (empty($news)):?>

    <h2>There are not news in the database.</h2>

<?php else:?>

    <h2><?php echo $heading;?>

    <?php foreach($news as $new):?>

        <h3><?php echo $new->title;?></h3>

        <p><?php echo $new->text;?></p>

        <hr />

    <?php endforeach?>

<?php endif?>

</div>

The creation of this view file completes the other MVC triad required to build the main section of a web page. As this one and the previous view render partials of the page, obviously it’s mandatory to code a master layout that includes those partials.

Building the master layout will be the conclusion of this series of articles. So, in the meantime feel free to tweak the code of the controllers and views defined before, which should give you a more solid understanding of how to implement the HMVC design pattern in PHP 5. 

Final thoughts

In this penultimate installment of the series, I added something to the sample web application being developed here -- namely, a couple of MVC modules that will be used for building the link bar and the main section of a web page. Undoubtedly, the question that comes up at this point is: how will these modules accomplish that task?

Well, here’s where the HMVC design pattern comes in. In the final chapter I’m going to define a generic web page controller, which will use the previous MVC triads to render sections of the aforementioned web page. Best of all, this will be achieved with one single HTTP request.

My suggestion is simple: don’t miss the last article!

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