Newbie Question about adding an array element on a page (php script) - php

Question

Apologize me if the question is unclear.
I'm a total newbie php user and I have this script that I want to edit.
The script have uses .tpl for the theme.
In the memberprofile.tpl there is the first name element $profilearray[0].firstname I want to add the result of this element also in another .tpl file called docs.tpl
I tried copying and pasting `$profilearray[0].firstname in docs.tpl but it did not work.
I noticed that docs.tpl uses its own $docsarray[0].xxx
So guys any idea how to do this? because there are some information in the member profile that I would like to add them inside the docs page.
I tried playing with mysql but I don't know how to use the same element firstname for both memberprofile and docs tables
I'm sure there is an easy way to do it.
Here's the full code from memberprofile.tpland I want to show some of these info in that theme docs.tpl
<p class="gray">
{$lang112}: <b>{$profilearray[0].firstname} {$profilearray[0].lastname}</b><br>
{$lang130}: <b>{$profilearray[0].birthday}</b><br>
{$lang134}: <b>{if $profilearray[0].gender eq "1"}Male{elseif $profilearray[0].gender eq "0"}Female{/if}</b><br>
{$lang140}: <b>{$profilearray[0].city}</b> <br>
{$lang139}: <b>{$profilearray[0].country}</b> <br>
{$lang113}: <b>{insert name=get_stripped_phrase value=a assign=pdesc details=$profilearray[0].description}{$pdesc}</b> <br>
{$lang259}: <b>{$profilearray[0].url|stripslashes|truncate:20:"...":true}</b> <br>
{$lang260}: <b>{insert name=get_time_to_days_ago value=var time=$profilearray[0].lastlogin}</b> <br>
{$lang261}: <b>{insert name=get_time_to_days_ago value=var time=$profilearray[0].addtime}</b>
</p>

Answer 1

Smarty has a tag you can google for called {include} that will do what you want. http://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/language.function.include.tpl Use that tag on your docs.tpl file and you will be fine.

Answer 2

$profilearray
in your example is assigned to smarty template before the template is called in some fashion simmilar to this
$smarty->assign('profilearray',$somearray);
you'll need to find what is setting that in your first file then make sure that is included in your second template call
but you should certainly read the smarty documentation to understand what you are trying to do.

Answer 3

To step back for a moment... There are two parts to all this. The first part is the PHP code which actually takes user input, queries the database, processes the data, etc. The second part is the TPL file. As much as possible, the TPL file should only be concerned with presentation, not with data-processing, data-cross-referencing, etc.
All that database-reading and cross-referencing should happen inside a plain PHP file, not inside the TPL.
In order to add "Author information" to the "Documents List" (or whatever you call docs.tpl) page, you need to find the PHP code which pulls up the list of documents. Find the PHP code where it says something like:
$smarty->assign('docsarray',$document_list);
Now what you want to do is pass more information to the smarty template (TPL file) so that it can display it. Something like:
for($document_list as $index => $doc){
$owner = $doc['owner']; // Get the owner of the document
$profile = getProfile($owner); // Create one of the same things that go into $profilearray elsewhere
$document_list[$index]['profile'] = $profile; // Modify original array
}
$smarty->assign('docsarray',$document_list);
Then go into docs.tpl and find where it displays information about each document, and add smarty template code to read from the new per-document information you added. (Check the Smarty reference page for details.)
For example, if docs.tpl shows a table of documents, you might add a new column that shows the author's first/last name:
<tr>
<td>{$docsarray[$index].title}</td>
<td>{$docsarray[$index].created_date}</td>
<!-- Next line is new -->
<td>{$docsarray[$index].profile.firstname} {$docsarray[$index].profile.lastname}</td>
</tr>
If you want something that looks exactly like the "profile box", you can do that too. In fact, using {include} you can create profilebox.tpl and use it in both places to reduce redundant code.