noob to smarty, UDT writing needs a little coaching

npeg · **Joined:** Thu Apr 14, 2011 1:33 pm **Posts:** 3

My end goal is to pass the page alias into my UDT which will then make related database queries.

Trying to get a handle on how to communicate between smarty/php.

I see lots of examples of UDT's where there's:

Code:

global $gCms;

but no references as to what this global var is. I'm assuming it's a reference to the 'scope' of the CMS/smarty itself (?)

I know you can pass params in via the tag:

Code:

 {content assign=pagecontent}
  {table_of_contents thepagecontent="$pagecontent"}

but i'm not sure where to look to find out (reference) what smarty variables are available to pass in ( i see that 'content' is assigned to a php variable and passed in directly to the UDT in the above example )

any help would be great!

VesQ · **Joined:** Sat Apr 09, 2011 10:24 am **Posts:** 2

The $gCms is a global object for CmsObject class. You need it to get a reference to the ADODB-object when you're about to make queries to the database, e.g.

Code:

global $gCms;
$db =& $gCms->GetDb(); // an ADODB-object reference. Notice that we're using only a reference and thus not creating a new object in memory.

// Now when we have $db available, we can do queries like this:
$query = "SELECT * FROM myspecialtable WHERE username = ?";
$result = array();
$rs = $db->Execute($query,$params['username']);
if($rs && $rs->RecordCount() > 0) {
    $result = $rs->GetArray();
}
echo '<pre>';
print_r( $result );
echo '</pre>';

Notice that there's the special array, called $params, I'm using. It hold's the variables you have inputted to your UDT. So if I wanted to get all the results from myspecialtable where field username has the value "Bob", I'd call my UDT like this:

Code:

{myudt username='Bob'}

I hope this answer is what you needed.

VesQ · **Joined:** Sat Apr 09, 2011 10:24 am **Posts:** 2

Oh, and have you read this? http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... fined_Tags

It helps you making your own UDT's

Wishbone · **Joined:** Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:39 pm **Posts:** 1316

$gCms is an instance of the CmsObject class: http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/apidoc/CMS/CmsObject.html

You can use {get_template_vars} to see all smarty variables available to your template.

npeg · **Joined:** Thu Apr 14, 2011 1:33 pm **Posts:** 3

thanks for the excellent responses guys! I'm beginning to get a handle on the whole smarty/UDT tag thing.

If i wanted to pass in a template var (page_alias) to my UDT, how would i go about that? (I haven't found an example yet)

{myUDT myVar=page_alias}

Ultimately i want to query a separate/non-cms database using the page_alias/product name

noob to smarty, UDT writing needs a little coaching

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