How to fetch() sub-parts of a Smarty template

Question

Background Smarty is a templating engine that separates the presentation layer from the logic layer of web applications. It is well-suited for the Model-View-Control approach to developing web applications. The View can be represented by Smarty templates, which contain only HTML and Smarty tags. The Control can be implemented by PHP files that serve the appropriate views based on the logic contained within them via PHP code. The View is instantiated by displaying the templates via the display() command. Alternatively, a template can be read in as a variable without displaying it via the fetch() command. The file name of the template is the argument to both these commands.

Issue The fetch() command can read an entire template. In order to read parts/sub-parts of a template, each of these parts would normally needed to be stored in a separate file with its own name that can be the argument to the command. This creates needless files.

Question Is it possible to fetch only parts of a Smarty template by somehow marking sections of the template?

Case example Below I present a sample template file with Smarty and HTML tags, as well as the corresponding controller file with PHP code.

Template file (index.tpl)

<html>
<body>
    <div id="sec1">
        First section
    </div>
    <div id="sec2">
        Second section
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Controller file (index.php)

<?php
    $smarty = new Smarty;
    $template = $smarty->fetch("index.tpl");
?>

In the example above, the $template variable would contain the full output from the template page. Below is a dump of its contents from the example.

$template => string(255)
"<html><body>
<div id="sec1">First section</div>
<div id="sec2">Second section</div>
</body></html>"

However, suppose I wish to read in the code from each of the DIV containers separately, and store them into separate variables, how could I achieve this? For instance, suppose I have a magical function called fetch_sub(). Here's my expectations of using it.

<?php
    $smarty = new Smarty;
    $div1 = $smarty->fetch_sub("index.tpl", "sec1");
    $div2 = $smarty->fetch_sub("index.tpl", "sec2");
?>

Then $div1, etc would contain only the relevant sub-part, instead of the whole template.

Other info I am not a beginner with Smarty and have a fairly good handle on basic concepts, as well as some of Smarty's advanced concepts. Following is my attempts so far at conceptualizing the problem and getting to a solution. My initial rough idea is to demarcate the template into sections using {capture}, and then somehow reference each of these sections. I present an outline example of the idea below.

    {capture name=sec1}
    <div id="sec1">
        First section
    </div>
    {/capture}
    . . .

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 10 '12 at 07:18

Smarty (as of Smarty 3.1) has no built-in feature to allow you achieving your goal. I had proposed something similar in 2011, but we haven't come around to implementing it.

Maybe you can have the generated HTML parsed to DOM and help yourself with xpath, or something like that?

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 25 '15 at 17:52

You can try this:

sec1.tpl

<div id="sec1">First section</div>

sec2.tpl

<div id="sec2">Second section</div>

index.tpl

<html><body>
{include file="sec1.tpl"}
{include file="sec2.tpl"}
</body></html>

And then You can fetch parts by invoking:

 $smarty = new Smarty;
$div1 = $smarty->fetch("sec1.tpl");
$div2 = $smarty->fetch("sec2.tpl");

How to fetch() sub-parts of a Smarty template

2 Answers2