How to fetch block's label in xml from phtml in Magento?

Question

I have a custom block in my layout file like this:

<block type="xxx/xxx" name="xxx" template = "bar.phtml">
<label>Foo</label>
</block>

How do I get the value of label from bar.phtml ?

Please note I do not want to use setData function to set my variable and pass it. I want to extract the value inside tags from the phtml (or anywhere else). I hope its clear.

Answer 1

I don't think there is a really classy Magento way of doing it since the label of a block purpose is not to be displayed as far as we speak of the frontend.

label : This element is introduced since Magento 1.4. It defines the label of the handle which is shown as a descriptive reference in some areas of the admin panel.

Source

I would really warmly recommend you to stay away from the code below . But if that is really what you want to achieve, this is a way :

First we get the layout = a big xml concatenation of the layout for that page containing the xml where the block is defined, and thus our label

$layout = $this->getLayout();

Then we get the current block name in the layout

$currentBlockNameInLayout = $this->getNameInLayout();

We can, then get the XML node representing the current block in the template.
getXpath() does returns an array, so that is why I used list() to get the first item off of this array

list($currentBlockInLayout) = $layout->getXpath("//block[@name='".$currentBlockNameInLayout."']");

We have what we want and can echo its label element

echo $currentBlockInLayout->label;

Take care though, this is an object of type Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Element so if you want to do anything else than displaying it, you would have to use the __toString() method

var_dump( $currentBlockInLayout->label->__toString() );

Full code :

$layout = $this->getLayout();
$currentBlockNameInLayout = $this->getNameInLayout();
list($currentBlockInLayout) = $layout->getXpath("//block[@name='".$currentBlockNameInLayout."']");
echo $currentBlockInLayout->label;
var_dump( $currentBlockInLayout->label->__toString() );

Answer 2

In your XML, use the action method setData

<block type="xxx/xxx" name="xxx" template = "bar.phtml">
    <action method="setData">
        <label>Foo</label>
    </action>
</block>

Then in your bar.phtml file, you can retrieve it using $this->getData('label') :

<?php echo $this->getData('label') ?>