Phalcon / Volt dynamically build/render common template areas (partials)

Question

I'm starting a project using Phalcon framework with Volt as a template engine. I have some experience with Symfony/Twig. I read documentation and tried searching all over the internet but can't find a satisfying way to accomplish what I want (I find ugly the solution described here: How do I create common template with header and footer for phalcon projects with Volt Engine ; it's not using Volt per se for the navigation.)

So the story is pretty easy: my base template consists of 4 parts: navigation, header, content and footer. I use partials to include the common areas in the base template like the navigation, header and the footer, works fine with "static data".

Now the question is: how do I get to dynamically generate the navigation menu with items coming from the database? The template will have common areas that have to come from DB also in the header, footer and a sidebar. Having to fetch that in all Controller actions sounds like overkill and not very DRY (maybe do it on the init part? but will have to be done in every controller. Maybe in an abstract controller, I dunno.)

What is the best way to accomplish this in Phalcon/Volt? In Symfony/Twig you can call from the view a controller action, so you can have like a LayoutController that renders partials from a page.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here are few variants:

1) Your controllers can extend a BaseController and in it's initialize() method you can assign those variables to the view.

class BaseController extends \Phalcon\Mvc\Controller
{
    public function initialize()
    {
        // Common Variables
        $this->view->assetsSuffix = $this->config->debug ? '' : '.min';
    }

2) Create a custom Volt function which loads the data.

// In your Volt service:
$compiler->addFunction('getMenu', function($resolvedArgs, $exprArgs){
    return 'Helpers\CommonFunctions::getMenu(' . $resolvedArgs . ')';
})

// Helper file and function
public static function getMenu()
{
    return \Models\Menu::find();
}

// Volt usage
{% set menuItems = getMenu() %}
{% for item in menuItems %}

{% endfor %}

3) Use the models to query the DB directly from the template. However this is not yet supported with Volt (not sure if it is added in latest version, have to confirm).

<?php $menuItems = \Models\Menu::find(); ?>
{% for item in menuItems %}

{% endfor %}

4) Ajax/Javascript, but this is really dependant on your application. Something like Angular approach, but I will not get into details with this varaiant.