How can I put something like this in a Smarty template? - php

Question

I am trying to convert a pre-existing site that had html and php intermingled into a Smarty template based site. I never used Smarty before so this is proving very difficult for me. I get that you can assign a variable like so:
$smarty->assign('number_of_items_in_cart', $number_of_items_in_cart);
and use it in the tpl file like so:
{$number_of_items_in_cart}
but what about more complex things like this block of code that I had on the old site:
$query = mysql_query(" SELECT * FROM products WHERE id = '$pid' ");
if (mysql_num_rows($query) == 1) {
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
extract($row);
echo "<h2>$name</h2>";
echo "<img src='images/product_images/$image' alt='' width='100' />";
echo $description;
echo '<p>'.money($price).'</p>';
echo "<input type='text' value='1' class='qty-$id' />";
echo "Add to Cart";
}
} else {
redirect('404.php');
}
How can I work with this in a Smarty template, since the output is within a while loop?

Answer 1

Instead of echoing this, you can append it in a string variable then pass it to smarty:
$string = "";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
extract($row);
$string .= "<h2>$name</h2>";
$string .= "<img src='images/product_images/$image' alt='' width='100' />";
$string .= $description;
$string .= '<p>'.money($price).'</p>';
$string .= "<input type='text' value='1' class='qty-$id' />";
$string .= "Add to Cart";
}
Now u can pass it to smarty
$smarty->assign('place_holder', $string);
I hope this is what you are looking for

Answer 2

You can use the foreach builtin function to iterate over an array containing your query results.
You could also use foreachelse to display an alternate message (though in this case you're redirecting).
See example 7.9 in http://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/language.function.foreach .
Edit: there's also a while function if that's what you really want.