php lib templates / mysql

[padders]

I am currently using something like:

<?php

include "template.inc";

$to = "to@domain.com";
$from = "from@domain.com";

$t = new Template();
$t->set_file(array(
    "email_user" => "email_user.ihtml",
    "email_admin" => "email_admin.ihtml"
    ));

$t->set_var(array(
    "to" => "$to",
    "from" => "$from"
    ));

$user_body = $t->parse("MyOutput1","email_user");
$admin_body = $t->parse("MyOutput2","email_admin");

echo $user_body;
echo $admin_body;

?>

using phplib's template class (thanks freddy!)

anyway, i would much prefere to store these specific templates (they are are for emails and i will have quite a lot of them) in a database, i tried this, replacing email_user.ihtml with $email for example but it does not work, it apparently thinks that $email is the name of the template file as opposed to the actual text i want parsed. Any ideas?

[Skunk]

The set_file, set_var and set_block methods all do EXACTLY the same thing - they create an internal template variable and return a handle by which it can be referenced.

set_file will load the information for the template variable from a specified file, while set_var will specify the template variable information in the function. As a result, if you want to store the template in a database all you need to do is retrieve it from the database and then use set_var in place of set_file to send it to the template class.

Simply load the template from the database into a PHP variable (for example $email_user_template), then use:

$t->set_var("email_user", $email_user_template);

To perform the function that you previously used set_file for.

The other (neater) way of doing it would be to extend or edit the Template class to add a new method called "set_dbtemplate" which accepts a database ID and loads the template from the database itself

[padders]

thank you so so so so much, as well as working it out and now understand what is going on a lot better, thank you.

I think you class idea is a good one, but i am going to complicate - i am going to try and work out how i could get an array of templates back based on an array of ids.. basically to save multiple queries. I guess doing the easy way first is an idea and then complicate it afterwards