Change behaviour of render method

[xepozz]

What steps will reproduce the problem?

Using render function to render content of view file looks too hard.
Instead of return the result of render function we should to create response before and write data after.
Let's delegate creating the Response object to render function.

What is the expected result?

User controllers will be more simpler and cleaner

public function index(): Response
{
    return $this->render('index');
}

What do you get instead?

public function index(): Response
{
    $output = $this->render('index');
    $response = $this->responseFactory->createResponse();
    $response->getBody()->write($output);
    return $response;
}

[samdark]

View component is not aware of request-response. Its job is rendering templates. I don't think it's a good idea to couple it like suggested.

Still, I agree that it looks a bit cumbersome to create response like that (while it makes perfect sense if redirect or sending headers is involved).

Possible solutions:

1. Allow returning strings from handlers (actions).
2. Provide a shortcut method like createResponseWithBody($string).
3. ???

[xepozz]

If you want to render and collect result to string you can use $this->getView()->render(...);
Controller::render() is only wrapper over $view->render. I do not see any problems in returning Response

Moreover, such a template is familiar to all PHP developers (at least), because all frameworks provide such a convenient interface.

[samdark]

Returning response directly from render()? Some references would not hurt...

[yiiliveext]

I think @xepozz means something like this

//abstract class Controller
protected function render(string $view, array $parameters = []): string
{
    $response = $this->responseFactory->createResponse();
    $content = $this->view->render($view, $parameters, $this);
    $response->getBody()->write($this->renderContent($content));

    return $response;
}

[samdark]

Yes but that would be:

protected function render(string $view, array $parameters = []): Response

[yiiliveext]

Yes but that would be:

Of course, I've just forgotten to change after copying.

[samdark]

Thought more about it. It doesn't sound bad to do it.