I'm playing around with CodeIgniter; hoping to convert some of my old, ugly PHP into a more maintainable framework. However, I've come across a rather frustrating roadblock - I can't seem to define methods in my views. Any time I try I get a completely blank page, and when I look in the debug log the processing seemed to stop after the view was loaded. Can I define methods within views? If not, why, and what workarounds would you suggest?
Note: The method has to do with formatting output strings.
Define your functions in a helper and load them from the controller. That way you can reuse the functions in other views, as well.
I'm not familiar with CodeIgnitor, but it could be including your templates multiple times. Try wrapping your function in a check:
if (!function_exists('myfunc'))
{
function myfunc() {}
}
CodeIgnitor is probably swallowing errors, so you could also try flushing buffers immediately before your function:
while(ob_end_flush()){}
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
In reality though, you should probably make your string formatting code a bit more general. Your template is not really a good place to start adding functions. You'll begin duplicating code, and it defeats the purpose of having templates at all. I'd suggest experimenting with CodeIgnitor's Helpers and Plugins
Views are not meant to call controller actions. Reverse your logic, call that function in the controller and set it to a variable you sent to the view. Then you can have the if statement check that variable in your view template.
If that doesn't work for you, maybe a helper is what you need: http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/helpers.html