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Brickhouse

Views

Views are files that are stored in the resources/views/ subdirectory in your application. They contain the layout, content and styling of every page which will be shown to your users.

Views are written in an extended version of HTML, which allows for more dynamic and interpolated content. This makes it much easier to iterate and re-use existing templates in multiple places.

When rendering HTML views, you should use the .html.php file extension. You can also use JSON views.

Rendering views

Views can be created in multiple different ways, but the easiest and recommended way is to use the view helper:

routes/app.php
Router::get('/', fn() => render('Welcome'));

This will render the template located at resources/views/welcome.html.php and send it back to the user.

Displaying data

You can use the renderer to interpolate content in the template. You can do so by wrapping the variable in curly braces. For example, when given the following route:

routes/app.php
Router::get('/', fn() => render('Welcome', ['name' => 'Max']))

Where Welcome references to the template:

<p>Hello, {{ $name }}.</p>

The view will render as:

<p>Hello, Max.</p>

You can also display the results of any PHP function - or really any PHP code:

resources/views/welcome.html.php
<p>UNIX Time: {{ time() }}</p>

Conditions

The templating engine allows for conditions, which act on any data passed to the template. They provide a more concise way of adding conditional content to your template, without using PHP’s control structures.

Conditional statements, along with other control structures, as defined using attributes:

<p :if="count($rows) === 1">There is a single row.</p>
<p :else-if="count($rows) > 1">There is multiple rows.</p>
<p :else>There are no rows.</p>

Just like interpolation, these attributes support any PHP code which can be used inside a normal if-statement.

Loops

In addition to conditional attributes, you can also iterate over elements in a list:

<p :for="$i = 0; $i < 10; $i++">Row index: {{ $i }}</p>
<p :foreach="$users as $user">User ID: {{ $user->id }}</p>

JSON Views

So far, we’ve only discussed HTML views. But, Brickhouse also supports JSON views for your API endpoints. They are also stored in the resources/views/-directory, but they use the .json.php extension.

As opposed to HTML views which render some HTML content, JSON views return an array which represents the JSON structure to render. For example, the given view:

resources/views/greeting.json.php
return [
    'greeting' => 'Hello, ' . $name
];
routes/app.php
use Brickhouse\Http\Router;


Router::get('/greeting', fn() => render('greeting', [
    'name' => 'Max'
]));

Would be rendered into:

{
    "greeting": "Hello, Max"
}

JSON views can be used alongside HTML views of the same name. The returned view would then be determined by which format the request is expected. For example, if a request has the header Accept: application/json, the JSON view would be returned. If the request has the header Accept: text/html, the HTML view would be returned.

So, given an HTML view and a JSON view of the same name:

resources/views/greeting.html.php
<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, {{ $name }}</h1>
    </body>
</html>
resources/views/greeting.json.php
return [
    'greeting' => 'Hello, ' . $name
];

Both views can be retrieved by sending a corresponding Accept-header:

Terminal window
$ curl http://localhost:8000/greeting -H "Accept: text/html"
<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, Max</h1>
    </body>
</html>
Terminal window
$ curl http://localhost:8000/greeting -H "Accept: application/json"
{
    "greeting": "Hello, Max"
}

JSON routes

While you can use the Accept-header to define which format to retrieve, Brickhouse also allows you to specifiy the format in the request path, like so:

Terminal window
$ curl http://localhost:8000/greeting.json
{
    "greeting": "Hello, Max"
}

This is inspired by how Ruby on Rails handles format segments. This also works for .html views, and possibly more in the future.