Yet another blog about PHP, HTML and CSS » Smarty

How to concatenate two object attributes and assign the result to a variable

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:21:25 +0000

All right, this is really no rocket science it’s just something I needed and took me some time to figure out.

{assign var="fullName" value="`$human->first` `$human->last`"}

or more robust version:

{capture assign="fullName"}
{$human->first} {$human->last}
{/capture}

Date formatting in Smarty

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:23:44 +0000

If you use the so called, German date format (day of month. month. year) you may have wondered how to achieve it with Smarty – without the leading zeroes for month.

You all know the common way to format date in Smarty:

{$myDate|date_format:"%e. %m. %Y"}

If you ever wanted to have month number without the leading zeroes, here’s how:

{$myDate|date_format:"%e. %#m. %Y"}

or even a cooler way:

{assign var="myDateTimestamp" value=$myDate|strtotime}
{"j. n. Y"|date:$myDateTimestamp}

(because you can use almost any PHP function as Smarty variable modifier, just solve the parameters-order problem)

Question

Got any better solution? Tell me about it!

How to report messages to user

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:21:45 +0000

In the course of executing a program you need to report errors / success messages to the user. But you don’t want to mix your code with HTML, right? (A quick explanation on separating presentation from business / data logic.)

So here’s what I use:

class MessageStack {
var $_stack = array();
…
/**
* Factory function, ensures that
* MessageStack is a singleton
*/
function create() {
…
}
function add($type, $text) {
$this->_stack[$type][] = $text;
}
/**
* Returns stack contents
*/
function get() {
return $this->_stack;
}
}

When I want to report something I call:

$messageStack = MessageStack::create();
$messageStack->add(‘ok’, ‘Record saved.’);

Then in your main file you run this:

$messageStack = MessageStack::create();
$smarty->assign("messages", $messageStack->get());

Include this into template (preferably the part that is included into every template):

{foreach from=$messages key=type item=messagesType}
{section name=pc loop=$messagesType}
{$type}">{$messagesType[pc]}
{/section}
{/foreach}

And then in css, define all message types:

.message {
font-weight: bold;
padding: 5px;
}
.critical {
background-color: black;
padding: 2px 5px 3px 5px;
margin: 3px 0px;
}

Question

Do you use something like this or something more clever? Share your wisdom :-)