Templating

Templated request handlers

The primary use case for templating is within request handlers, to provide templated responses. To do this, you will:

• Inject an instance of Zend\Expressive\Template\TemplateRendererInterface into your request handler.
• Potentially add paths to the templating instance.
• Render a template.
• Add the results of rendering to your response.

Injecting a TemplateRendererInterface

We encourage the use of dependency injection. As such, we recommend writing your request handler to accept the TemplateRendererInterface via either the constructor or a setter. As an example:

namespace Acme\Blog;

use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;
use Zend\Expressive\Template\TemplateRendererInterface;

class EntryHandler implements RequestHandlerInterface
{
    private $templateRenderer;

    public function __construct(TemplateRendererInterface $renderer)
    {
        $this->templateRenderer = $renderer;
    }

    public function handler(ServerRequestInterface $request) : ResponseInterface
    {
        // ...
    }
}

This will necessitate having a factory for your request handler:

namespace Acme\Blog\Container;

use Acme\Blog\EntryHandler;
use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;
use Zend\Expressive\Template\TemplateRendererInterface;

class EntryHandlerFactory
{
    public function __invoke(ContainerInterface $container)
    {
        return new EntryHandler(
            $container->get(TemplateRendererInterface::class)
        );
    }
}

And, of course, you'll need to tell your container to use the factory; see the container documentation for more information on how you might accomplish that.

Consuming templates

Now that we have the templating engine injected into our request handler, we can consume it. Most often, we will want to render a template, optionally with substitutions to pass to it. This will typically look like the following:

namespace Acme\Blog;

use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;
use Zend\Diactoros\Response\HtmlResponse;
use Zend\Expressive\Template\TemplateRendererInterface;

class EntryHandler implements RequestHandlerInterface
{
    private $templateRenderer;

    public function __construct(TemplateRendererInterface $renderer)
    {
        $this->templateRenderer = $renderer;
    }

    public function handle(ServerRequestInterface $request) : ResponseInterface
    {
        // do some work...
        return new HtmlResponse(
            $this->templateRenderer->render('blog::entry', [
                'entry' => $entry,
            ])
        );
    }
}