Simple ListsHelper for displaying nested ul / ol lists
Posted on 29/6/06 by Felix Geisendörfer
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Update: I opened a ticket for this functionality. See Ticket 1103.
Today I needed to display a simple ul list in one of my views, and was pretty surprised that the html helper didn't offer some kind of function for this. So I just went ahead and wrote my own little ListsHelper to compensate this lag for now. However, I'll open a ticket asking for this functionality in the html helper since I think it's pretty basic.
The code doesn't know any fancy ways to style the individual li's, so it's only really good for simple purposes, but here we go:
{
var $helpers = array('Html');
function ul($items, $htmlAttributes = null, $return = false)
{
$out ="<ul" . $this->Html->_parseAttributes($htmlAttributes) . ">\n";
$out = $out . $this->__createLiList($items);
$out = $out."</ul>\n";
return $this->output($out, $return);
}
function ol($items, $htmlAttributes = null, $return = false)
{
$out ="<ol" . $this->Html->_parseAttributes($htmlAttributes) . ">\n";
$out = $out . $this->__createLiList($items);
$out = $out."</ol>\n";
return $this->output($out, $return);
}
function __createLiList($items)
{
$out = "";
foreach ($items as $key => $val)
{
if (is_array($val))
{
$out = $out."<li>".$this->__createLiList($val)."</li>\n";
}
else
{
$out = $out."<li>".$val."</li>\n";
}
}
return $out;
}
}
Usage is pretty simple, just take an array and pass it to the function (after you've added the Lists helper to your var $helpers in controller):
--Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined
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Hi ad,
the reason my helper doesn't extend the HtmlHelper is pretty simple. I want the HtmlHelper to be accessible via $html. So when I would extend the ListsHelper from HtmlHelper I would end up with 2 HtmlHelpers, one of them in $lists (with ol and ul function) and the old one in $html. Seems like wasted memory to me. Now there are ways to extend CakePhp's CoreHelpers to do what you want and make them accessible with their standard names (like $html), and in fact I've done that before (search this blog for FlexiFix). But for if I want to share my code later on, only people with the same fix to the HtmlHelper could use my code with $html->ul() in it, all others would just go crazy trying to figure out why their $html Helper doesn't offer a function like this.
I hope this comment of mine made sense to you, I sometimes suck at explaining my OOP decisions : P.
[...] ThinkingPHP » Simple ListsHelper for displaying nested ul / ol lists A simple helper to manage ul’s (tags: cakephp helper) [...]
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Thanks Felix, I also agree it is much needed - lists are fundamental. A quick question about the way you have extended the CakePHP code though.... I'm still trying to understand how Cake has been designed. I see you make use of the HTML helper by including it in the $helpers array. Is there a reason you don't use inheritance? (class ListsHelper extends HtmlHelper...)
I would have thought extending the HTML helper would be the way to go, giving you direct access to the (pseudo) private HtmlHelper methods such as _parseAttributes, but is there something in the design of Cake that recommends this "has a" relationship as opposed to "is a" inheritence ?