How does the lithium PHP framework generate a $this context in a PHP page?

Question

I've been investigating the Lithium PHP Framework and I don't understand how it sets $this->context; (particularly in this layout.)

Since you cannot simply re-assign $this obviously this layout will get included at some point and what confuses me even more is the fact that they use $this outside a class definition.

I haven't coded PHP in a while so please help me out here.

Answer 1

The first idea that strikes me is that this templating page is called from a method.

class Viewer
{
    public $html;
    private $title;
    private $content;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->html = new \Utilities\HTMLBag();
    }
    public function loadView($template)
    {
        ob_start();
        include 'path/to/views/'.$template.'.php';
        $this->content = ob_get_clean();
    }
    public function title()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }
}

From this point, the included $template can access any method of Viewer's class