Lol just encountered that today when I had doubled up on a helper

In hindsight then is this the best method, calling many methods each time must have a overhead?? : I was doing this before:

Setting the properties as a default:

// {{{ properties

/**
* Vars to set the defaults for the request invite forms
*/
private $defaults = array(
‘canPost’ => true,
‘canDelete’ => false,
‘canMark’ => true,
‘canCreate’ => true,
‘numberTopics’ => 5,
‘callbackUrl’ => false,
‘returnUrl’ => false
);

// }}}

in the helper method:

public function facebook_Board($params = array()) {

// Merge the two arrays to overwrite default values.
$params = array_merge($this->defaults, $params);

echo $params['canPost'];

}

This way I could set an array at the helper load that was nicely key paired.

What do you think about view helpers that throw exceptions? I like the idea of using the __toString() method, but this will result in an error if an exception is thrown.

Thanks.

the reason i use a default values method is because the zend framework will keep the same instance of the view helper for later use. we need to ‘reset’ the instance every time we call the helper. if we do not, this would happen:

$this->friends()->show(3)->gender(‘Male’)

we would expect it to output 3 male friends.

now, later on the page, we call $this->friends()->show(5) and expect it to output 5 friends, male or female. however, since we used ->gender(‘Male’) earlier, it will only output male friends.

the _defaultValues() method should reset all parameters to their default state to prevent this confusion.

thanks for the comments.

Where do the properties

_show and _gender come into play

dont you want

# private $show = DefaultValue;
# private $gender = DefaultValue;

you can then get rid of the other method that sets the defaults.

You should put the toString into the final method.

Good stuff

Do you think it would be helpful to add something like;

public function __call($method, $args)
{
App::log(“ERROR: No method ‘$method’ in helper “.get_class($this));
return $this;
}

to prevent any possible “Call to undefined method” errors?