Smarty

[satanistlav]

Smarty triggers fatal error when refering to nested object methods like

[boots]

Yes, it does because it is not a supported feature.

[tobias_l]

what would it take to extend smarty to compile and map such object method calls?

[boots]

I seem to recall someone suggesting a patch. Search the forums for "derefrencing methods" or something similar. It wouldn't work for PHP4 without emulation which is bound to be slow and potentially buggy.

[tobias_l]

thanks for the hint! with php5 an emulation wouldn't be necessary and also not slow, right?

[boots]

Right. With PHP5, it just needs the compiler to observe the syntax in the template and to emit the corresponding PHP5 code. If you've done the search you probably know I don't favour this very much. It is really a programmer's idiom and most people seem to want it to chain get methods on nested objects. This can easily be done under PHP5 using __get(). This means you can do things like $foo->bar->baz in template instead of $foo->getbar()->getbaz() etc. The tempation to pass in "pure" application objects into your templates is greater with method derefrencing and IMHO, that is a very slippery slope.

[tobias_l]

why should the approach using $foo->bar->baz be "better" than using $foo->getbar()->getbaz() ?

my class "foo" (class of object $foo) has the method "bar()" that returns an object. this object does not exists within class "foo" as a property. it gets instanciated in the method and is returned by it.

example:

i have a simple bean like:

class Book {
var $bookId;
var $authorId;
...
/* some getter and setter methods */
...
/* additional methods */
function getAuthor() {
return new Author($this->authorId)
}
}

method "getAuthor" returns an object of type Author that gets instanciated on calling time of method "getAuthor" and not on instanciation time of class Book.

[cybot]

[extra74]

anybody active on this thread?
I have similar problems and I can not solve it...
_________________
www.svensk-server.info

[minichate]

Its a feature I'd really like to have. There is a patch for smarty which does the trick for me but not having it in the core smarty install causes headaches for us.