Controllers in Your Own MVC Framework in PHP

As you already know, all controllers in our framework have a render method that needs to be called to send data to the view. Our custom controllers inherit this method from the parent class Controller, located in the core. Let's create this class:

<?php
	namespace Core;
	
	class Controller
	{
		protected function render($view, $data) {
			
		}
	}
?>

As you can see, the render method takes the name of the view and the data for display as parameters. Let this method return an object of a special class Page, which will contain information about the view for the controller action. This class will contain the view name, data, as well as the page title and the name of the site layout file:

<?php
	namespace Core;
	
	class Page
	{
		private $layout;
		private $title;
		private $view;
		private $data;
		
		public function __construct($layout, $title, $view, $data)
		{
			$this->layout = $layout;
			$this->title  = $title;
			$this->view   = $view;
			$this->data   = $data;
		}
		
		public function __get($property)
		{
			return $this->$property;
		}
	}
?>

Then the code for our render method will look like this:

<?php
	namespace Core;
	
	class Controller
	{
		protected $layout = 'default';
		
		protected function render($view, $data) {
			return new Page($this->layout, $this->title, $view, $data);
		}
	}
?>

Let me explain what is happening here. The view name and data come as method parameters. However, the page title is also set in the custom controller - by writing to the title property. This means that $this->title will contain the title that we will pass to the constructor of the Page class.

There are also nuances with the layout. As you know, our framework uses the layout from the file default.php. In fact, each action can have a different layout. To do this, the action itself needs to write a different layout name to the layout property.

How this is achieved: our parent controller has a layout property, which by default has the value 'default.php'. This will be the default layout. However, if the action of the custom controller overrides the value of the layout property, then the layout will be different.

Copy the code of my Controller class and place it in the file /core/Controller.php.

Copy the code of my Page class and place it in the file /core/Page.php.