Zend Controller & Zend View

IÂ’m using the Zend Framework at the moment and came across a problem with creating custom helpers for the Zend_View class. All is fine if you place your helpers either within the zend frameworkÂ’s own helpers folder (not a good idea) or within a directory in your site structure. The problem arises if you place the helpers in a folder in the PHP include path and donÂ’t know the full path to the folder.

Early versions of the Zend Framework had a noRoute action that was called when the correct action couldnÂ’t be found. This was a way to deal with some page not found errors. At some point it was dropped - I donÂ’t know when or why because I only started using the Zend Framework recently. ItÂ’s still possible to handle non-existent actions using the __call() method of the controller class. But thereÂ’s no obvious way to deal with all page not found errors in one place, including instances where the controller doesnÂ’t exist.

Web site developers are familiar with a concept that a site consists of pages but Zend Framework proposes Controller/Action idea. Undoubtedly, Controller/Action is cool but how is it relevant to real world tasks? In other words, how is Controller/Action connected to the standard form flow?

I was wondering about how to extend a singleton class such that you could retrieve the new class when retrieving the singleton later. In particular, Zend_Controller_Front is a singleton, but what if I want to extend it later? A number of plugins in the Zend Framework, particularly view helpers and routing functionality, make use of the singleton; would I need to alter all of these later so I could make use of the new subclass ?

One of the new features to hit the Zend Framework since 0.7 is Zend_Controller_ModuleRouter and its sibling Zend_Controller_ModuleRewriteRouter. This allows for separating out sets of controlers, models and views into their own modules.

Zend_View is a class for working with the "view" portion of the model-view-controller pattern. That is, it exists to help keep the view script separate from the model and controller scripts. It provides a system of helpers, output filters, and variable escaping.
Zend_View is template system agnostic; you may use PHP as your template language, or create instances of other template systems and manipulate them within your view script.
Essentially, using Zend_View happens in two major steps: 1. Your controller script creates an instance of Zend_View and assigns variables to that instance. 2. The controller tells the Zend_View to render a particular view, thereby handing control over the view script, which generates the view output.

Zend_Controller provides the foundation for building a website based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

The Zend_Controller system is designed to be lightweight, modular, and extensible. It is a minimalist design to permit flexibility and some freedom to users while providing enough structure so that systems built around Zend_Controller share some common conventions and similar code layout.

The Zend_Controller workflow is implemented by several components. While it is not necessary to completely understand the underpinnings of all of these components to use the system, having a working knowledge of the process is helpful.

Bootstrapping and Controllers and Actions.

Zend Framework has two versions of Routing mechanism: Zend_Controller_Router (the default) and Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter (sparingly documented). You can easily make them call indexController::noRouteAction() on unexistence controllers, but on unexistence actions theyÂ’ll throw you an exception.

Who works with Zend Framework, most likely, have read the “Zend_Controller / Getting Started” Zend Framework manual article, which explains how to use Zend_Controller in the root folder of the web server. But it does not answer on the “How to run my Zend Framework application in a subfolder of the web server document folder?” question and I propose you my solutions. First is rather a hack then a recommended solution, but with it you can start the applications and examples that use standard router. The second is neater but it depends on the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class.