Dynamic layout in Yii

Question

I have a Yii application and in the layout I have a static sidebar. I would like to change the content of the sidebar depending on the controller action, or the view. At the moment, in the views/layouts/main.php file, I have a sidebar defined as:

<div class="sidebar">hello!</div>

When the controller is image and the action is test, I would like to display this:

<div class="sidebar">Created at <? echo $image->created_at; ?></div>

The $image object is defined in the image controller and the test action.

In short, I would like to display a sidebar when the controller is image and the action is test, however, I would not like to have a different layout entirely. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can put a simple if-else check, using getController(), getAction() like this :

if(Yii::app()->getController()->getId()=='image' && Yii::app()->getController()->getAction()->getId()=='test'){
    echo '<div class="sidebar">Created at '.$this->image->created_at.'</div>'; 
}
else
    echo '<div class="sidebar">hello!</div>';

To access $image in a layout we need to make it a public property of the image controller itself, then in the action test where we initialize the $image, we will initialize the public $image, example:

 class ImageController extends Controller{
     public $image;
     ...
     public function actionTest(){
         $this->image=Example::model()->findByPk(1);// example
         ...
     }
 }

This will allow us to access image in the layout albeit using $this->image->property.

Also in the layout $this refers to the current controller, hence we can also use $this->id instead of Yii::app()->getController()->getId() to get the controller id(name which is image here) and $this->action instead of Yii::app()->getController()->getAction()->getId() to get the action id.