Kohana: Buffering output on view and rendering it before in the source code

Sometimes you need to hack the order the source code is going to be rendered in a view:

– You want an extra piece of CSS that only aplies to that view, so you think it's not worth creating a single CSS file and including in your mashed file

– You need the same as above for javascript

– Your mind has not completely grasped the way to organize code in MVC  🙂

Here's a way to do it:

in your view you add something like this:

<?php View::start_buffer('head_end'); ?>
<style>
    ::-moz-selection {
        background: #b3d4fc;
        text-shadow: none;
    }

</style>
<?php  View::end_buffer('head_end'); ?>

Then, by taking advantage of the wonderful cascading file system that Kohana gives you, you create a View.php class in your application folder that will need to extend the render() function (I'm just adding the relevant changes for this to work; you can have your own extra sauce):

class View extends Kohana_View
{
    static public $buffers = array();

    public static function start_buffer($buffer_name)
    {
        self::$buffers[$buffer_name] = '';
        ob_start();
    }

    public static function end_buffer($buffer_name)
    {
        self::$buffers[$buffer_name] = ob_get_clean();
    }

    public function render($file = NULL)
    {
        $rendered = parent::render($file);

        if (! empty(self::$buffers['head_end']))
        {
            $rendered = str_replace('</head>', self::$buffers['head_end'] . '</head>', $rendered);
        }
        return $rendered;
    }

}

The buffer names are completely arbitrary, you can make them any way to want.

I leave up to you to improve the way each buffer will be mapped to different locations in the source code.

Drop me a line with your changes