Simplistic Kohana3 View_Model attempt

View_Model

<?php
/**
 * 
 * Simplistic View_Model attempt for Kohana 3
 * @author Cambiata
 */
class View_Model {

	public function render($viewfile=FALSE)
	{
		$viewfile = $viewfile ?: $this->get_viewfile();
		$modeldata = $this->render_modeldata();
		return View::factory($viewfile, $modeldata)->render();
	}
		
	public function __toString()
	{
		return $this->render();
	}

	//------------------------------------------------------------
	
	private function get_viewfile()
	{
		$segments = explode('_', strtolower(get_class($this)));
		if (count($segments) > 1) array_shift($segments);
		return implode('/', $segments);
	}

	private function render_modeldata()
	{
		$modeldata = array();
		$reflection = new ReflectionClass(get_class($this));

		$public_properties = $reflection->getProperties(ReflectionProperty::IS_PUBLIC);
		foreach ($public_properties as $property) 
		{
			$datakey = $property->name;
			$modeldata[$datakey] = $this->$datakey;
		}
		$protected_properties = $reflection->getProperties(ReflectionProperty::IS_PROTECTED);
		foreach ($protected_properties as $property) 
		{
			$datakey = $property->name;
			$modeldata[$datakey] = $this->$datakey;
		}
		$protected_methods = $reflection->getMethods(ReflectionProperty::IS_PROTECTED);
		foreach ($protected_methods as $protected_method) 
		{
			$datakey = $protected_method->name;
			$modeldata[$datakey] = $this->$datakey();	
		}		

		// dump all data to $modeldata parameter - for easy debugging		
		$modeldata['modeldata'] = $modeldata;
		return $modeldata;
	}	

}

Why would you allow protected methods to be accessible and not public? Seems like the wrong way round to me. Protected should not be accessible from a template.

Hi Luke!

The reason is that I want to be able to use public methods as getters/setters accessable from the controller, without risking that they would interfere with the template model data. From a traditional OO view that's not ideal, but I couldn't figure out something better without the use of PhpDoc comment directives. Haven't tried that, but it's a bit more complicated and might take some microseconds to parse...

Hmmm, just feels "hacky" to me. Kostache simply provides Kostache::set() for setting data. Surely that isn't too bad, I mean you already have ViewModel::render() which is public. Sure you could go down the magic route of PHPDoc style stuff, but again it feels like too much magic.

In ViewModel::render_modeldata() you could easily just skip a few predefined methods, and this way you could provide classes that extend ViewModel a way to exclude methods too!

In other news I will be releasing a cleaner, less convoluted update to Beautiful View that I would love you to take a look at if you have some spare time.

Thank you for your input! As I said, the purpose of creating this was fun and learning! :-)
I had an array with some methodnames to exclude, but took it away - wanted to keep it as minimalistic as possible.
I'm looking forward to the Beautiful view update! I'll check it out!