Note: This section is under development.
Widgets are self-contained building blocks for your views, a way to combine complex logic, display, and functionality into a single component. A widget:
- May contain advanced PHP programming
- Is typically configurable
- Is often provided data to be displayed
- Returns HTML to be shown within the context of the view
There are a good number of widgets bundled with Yii, such as active form, breadcrumbs, menu, and wrappers around bootstrap component framework. Additionally there are extensions that provide more widgets, such as the official widget for jQueryUI components.
In order to use a widget, your view file would do the following:
// Note that you have to "echo" the result to display it
echo \yii\widgets\Menu::widget(['items' => $items]);
// Passing an array to initialize the object properties
$form = \yii\widgets\ActiveForm::begin([
'options' => ['class' => 'form-horizontal'],
'fieldConfig' => ['inputOptions' => ['class' => 'input-xlarge']],
]);
... form inputs here ...
\yii\widgets\ActiveForm::end();In the first example in the code above, the [[yii\base\Widget::widget()|widget()]] method is used to invoke a widget
that just outputs content. In the second example, [[yii\base\Widget::begin()|begin()]] and [[yii\base\Widget::end()|end()]]
are used for a
widget that wraps content between method calls with its own output. In case of the form this output is the <form> tag
with some properties set.