Single news page

The Single News Page will be only an extension to the already existing News page. We will however need a new route, a Controller, and we will also create a new Template file to achieve this, and instruct the existing NewsList View Class to load this new template instead. Let’s dig in!

Creating the controller

First we are going to create a controller, that will retrieve the input parameter, validate it, and pass it to the model:

<?php
namespace App\Controller;

use App\Model\News as NewsModel;
use App\View\NewsList as NewsView;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\ParameterBag as Params;

class News
{
    protected $newsModel = null;

    public function __construct(NewsModel $newsModel)
    {
        $this->newsModel = $newsModel;
    }

    public function loadNews(Params $parameters, NewsView $newsView)
    {
        $newsView->template = "SingleNews";
        $params = $parameters->get("parameters");
        if (isset($params[0]) === false || is_numeric($params[0]) === false) {
            $newsView->viewData["error"] = "News ID not defined or not a valid ID";
            return;
        }

        $this->newsModel->where("id", (int)$params[0]);
    }
}

Our controller depends on the News Model and the News View. It parses the input parameter, and if the parameter is not found or is not numeric an error is set directly to the view data. If the input parameter validates, then we set the ID to the Models where statement and that is all from the controllers side, we will let the View Class obtain the data from Model, and fill it into view data as with News Listing.

Create the template

The Single News page will be slightly different, but in this guide, we can simply re-use the already existing NewsList View Class, so lets just create a new SingleNews.php template file:

<?= $subview_head; ?>
<div class="news-container">
    <?php if (isset($error)): ?>
        <div class="error" style="color:red"><?= $error; ?></div>
    <?php else: ?>
        <?php foreach ($newsArticles as $article): ?>
            <div class="news-article">
                <h1><?= $article->title; ?></h1>
                <p><?= $article->body; ?></p>
            </div>
        <?php endforeach; ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
    <a href="/news">Back</a>
</div>
<?= $subview_foot; ?>

The Route

We still need to take care of the Route of our single news page:

$this->_routes[] = [
    "uri"       =>  "news/[:params:]",
    "method"    =>  Route::METHOD_GET,
    "action"    =>  function (
        Request $request,
        Response $response,
        Application $app
    ) {
        $newsModel = $app["loadModel.service"]("News");
        $newsView = $app["loadView.service"]("NewsList", $newsModel);
        (new \App\Controller\News($newsModel))
            ->loadNews($request->query, $newsView);
        $newsView->addSubView("head", $app["loadView.service"]("Head"))
            ->addSubView("foot", $app["loadView.service"]("Foot"))
            ->render();
    }
];

Note the URI now contains a [:params:], which means that all URI sections will be converted to a parameters array, which we retrieved with the $request->query->get(“parameters”) call. And with that, is our single news page complete. We simply re-used all our existing parts, and slightly modified them, and added our first controller. Lets visit our news listing page, and click on a title of one entry. But before you do that, it is advised you have at least two news inserted into the database table, for testing purposes.