Send content to the layout using a Helper on CakePHP

This post is based on Robert Conner's code forCakePHP 1.x., and I made some changes to get it to work onCakePHP 2.x. The original post can be found here.

Maybe some people have faced problems trying to send some content to the layout on CakePHP. By content I mean not only a simple string but a whole a piece of HTML code. To solve this, we can create a Helper on CakePHP 2.x, according to the following steps:

1. Create the Helper

On theViews/Helpers folder, you need to create the .php file for the helper. In this case we will call it LayoutHelper.php.

class LayoutHelper extends AppHelper {
 var $__blockName = null;
 function blockStart($name) {
  if (empty($name))
   trigger_error('LayoutHelper::blockStart - name is a required parameter');
  if (!is_null($this->__blockName))
   trigger_error('LayoutHelper::blockStart - Blocks cannot overlap');
  
  $this->__blockName = $name;
  ob_start();
  return null;
 }
 
 function blockEnd(&$view){
  $buffer = @ob_get_contents();
  @ob_end_clean();
  $out = $buffer
  $view->viewVars[$this->__blockName . '_for_layout'] = $out;
  $this->__blockName = null
 }

 function output($var) {
  if (isset($var) && $var != null)
  echo $var;
 }
}

2. Setting up the content

For setting up the content that we want to send to the layout, we use the Helper.

$layout = $this->Helpers->load('Layout');
$layout->blockStart('custom_content');

Right after this, we specify the content that will be sent to the layout:

<div>Custom content</div>

and we close the block:

$layout->blockEnd($this);

3. Show the content

$layout = $this->Helpers->load('Layout');
$layout->output($custom_content_for_layout);

As we can see, this is really simple and also very useful when trying to customize the content on the layout according to the view we are loading.

I wrote this article also on The Bakery