Add View Helper Paths For Entire Zend Framework Application
January 17th, 2008I have been writing several Zend_View_Helpers to aid in the development of my Zend Framework Application. The helpers are very generic and are used in many of my Views throught my applications. So, naturally, I want an easy way to configure my Views to have access to my custom View Helpers. You don’t want to override the init() function in ALL of your controllers to set the View Helper path. Instead, set it in the bootstrap file – your index.php file in the root directory of your website. You do it like this:
$view = new Zend_View();
$view->addHelperPath("DU/View/Helper", "DU_View_Helper");
$viewRenderer = new Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer();
$viewRenderer->setView($view);
Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewRenderer);
Put those lines of code in your index.php file somewhere before you call dispatch() on your front controller and all of you view scripts will have access to your own library of View Helpers.
My company’s name is Digital Underware so I have my library set up just like the Zend library in the lib directory of my application. The path to my View Helpers is lib/DU/View/Helper just like the path to the built-in Zend View Helpers is lib/Zend/View/Helper.
If you are interested in seeing a complete example, take a look at this bootstrap file.
