Send content to the layout using a Helper on CakePHP

This post is based on Robert Conner's code forCakePHP 1.x., and I made some changes to get it to work onCakePHP 2.x . The original post can be found here.

Maybe some people have faced problems trying to send some content to the layout on CakePHP. By content I mean not only a simple string but a whole a piece of HTML code. To solve this, we can create a Helper on CakePHP 2.x, according to the following steps:

1. Create the Helper

On theViews/Helpers folder, you need to create the .php file for the helper. In this case we will call it LayoutHelper.php

class LayoutHelper extends AppHelper {
 var $__blockName = null;
 function blockStart($name) {
  if (empty($name))
   trigger_error('LayoutHelper::blockStart - name is a required parameter');
  if (!is_null($this->__blockName))
   trigger_error('LayoutHelper::blockStart - Blocks cannot overlap');
  
  $this->__blockName = $name;
  ob_start();
  return null;
 }
 
 function blockEnd(&$view){
  $buffer = @ob_get_contents();
  @ob_end_clean();
  $out = $buffer
  $view->viewVars[$this->__blockName . '_for_layout'] = $out;
  $this->__blockName = null
 }

 function output($var) {
  if (isset($var) && $var != null)
  echo $var;
 }
}

2. Setting up the content

For setting up the content that we want to send to the layout, we use the Helper

$layout = $this->Helpers->load('Layout');
$layout->blockStart('custom_content');

Right after this, we specify the content that will be sent to the layout

<div>Custom content</div>

and we close the block

$layout->blockEnd($this);

3. Show the content

For showing the content on the layout, we add the following

$layout = $this->Helpers->load('Layout');
$layout->output($custom_content_for_layout);

As we can see, this is really simple and also very useful when trying to customize the content on the layout according to the view we are loading

I wrote this article also on The Bakery

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