In case of generating menu, you are looking probably for extending yout BaseController class. It's quite good practice for generating content you need on all your controllers like menu, meta-data or breadcrumbs.
class BaseController extends \Phalcon\Mvc\Controller {
function initialize() {
$menus = Menus::find(array(
// you may want to condition query based on user cookie
// or controller you are in
'conditions' => 'controller = "' . $this->dispatcher->getControllerName() . '"'
));
// and set it as View variable to use it if you want
$this->view->setVar('menus', $menus);
}
}
And set all your controllers to use that as default:
class DefaultController extends BaseController { }
Than in menus.phtml:
<?php
foreach ($menus as $menu) {
echo "<li>".$menu->name."</li>";
}
should be enough. Looks better in Volt:
<ul>
{% for menu in menus %}
<li>
<a href="{{ menu.url }}">{{ menu.name }}</a>
</li>
{% enfor %}
In case of more complex problems, like generating content only on 50% of your pages, you may want to put into View only parameters, eg.:
$this->view->setVar('menus', array(
'conditions' => 'controller = "' . $this->dispatcher->getControllerName() . '"'
));
but that may be considered as not an elegant solution and is not preventing you from getting your hands on model in your View, what I assume you'd like to avoid. Slightly better would be setting an built query of queryBuilder and running its ->execute() in view loop, to not stress DB as long as it's not necessary.
