Custom

A Slim application delegates rendering of templates to its view object. A custom view is a subclass of \Slim\View that implements this interface:

<?php
public render(string $template);

The view object’s render method must return the rendered content of the template specified by its $template argument. When the custom view’s render method is invoked, it is passed the desired template pathname (relative to the Slim application’s “templates.path” setting) as its argument. Here’s an example custom view:

<?php
class CustomView extends \Slim\View
{
    public function render($template)
    {
        return 'The final rendered template';
    }
}

The custom view can do whatever it wants internally so long as it returns the template’s rendered output as a string. A custom view makes it easy to integrate popular PHP template systems like Twig or Smarty.

Heads Up! A custom view may access data passed to it by the Slim application’s render() method with $this->data.

You can browse ready-to-use custom views that work with popular PHP template engines in the Slim-Extras repository on GitHub.

Example View

<?php
class CustomView extends \Slim\View
{
    public function render($template)
    {
        // $template === 'show.php'
        // $this->data['title'] === 'Sahara'
    }
}

Example Integration

If the custom view is not discoverable by a registered autoloader, it must be required before the Slim application is instantiated.

<?php
require 'CustomView.php';

$app = new \Slim\Slim(array(
    'view' => new CustomView()
));

$app->get('/books/:id', function ($id) use ($app) {
    $app->render('show.php', array('title' => 'Sahara'));
});

$app->run();