Smarty

[daniel_james]

It's quite common to see this message when the 'bar' index wasn't assigned to the $foo array before display() was called:

Notice: Undefined index: bar in file.php on line 17

This can be helpful in that it can indicate that the programmer and template designer aren't on the same page; but often the index is intentionally not assigned, and the resulting error message necessitates more work to hide.

Right now the only options are:

1. Programmer sets $smarty->error_reporting = 0; //which requires debugging to be turned off
2. Programmer manually assigns a null value to each index that the template expects.
3. Template designer writes {if $foo.bar}{$foo.bar}{/if} for each template variable.

Most probably go for the third option, but I think that's repetitive and unnecessary. All that's really needed is the ability avoid these messages through smarty, either on a per-variable basis like this:

{$foo.bar optional=true}

Or globally like this:

$smarty->optional_vars = true;


I think this would only require some extra logic to be inserted when the template is compiled, something like this:

$foo['bar'] = isset($foo['bar'])?$foo['bar']:null;


Please consider this. I think such a feature would save a lot of people a lot of work. More than that, this would facilitate a greater degree of loose coupling between business logic and presentation logic (which is the goal of smarty right?).

If you think this is a bad idea, please, by all means shoot it down.

Thanks.