Adding A Layout

Every time the framework renders a view, it will try to leverage the default layout which is located in layouts/Main.cfm by convention. This is an HTML file that gives format to your output and contains the location of where the view you want should be rendered.

Tip : The request context can also be used to choose a different layout at runtime via the event.setLayout() method or the layout argument in the event.setView() method.

Tip : The request context can also be used to render a view with NO layout at all via the event.noLayout() method.

Layout Code

This location is identified by the following code: renderView()

<div id="maincontent">
#renderView()#
</div>

The call to the renderView() method with no arguments tells the framework to render the view that was set using event.setView(). This is called a rendering region. You can use as many rendering regions within layouts or even within views themselves.

Named Regions: The setView() method even allows you to name these regions and then render them in any layout or other views using the name argument.

Creating A Layout

Let's create a new simple layout with two rendering regions. Open up CommandBox and issue the following commands:

# Create a Funky layout
coldbox create layout name="Funky"

# Create a footer
coldbox create view name="main/footer"

Open the layouts/Funky.cfm layout and let's modify it a bit by adding the footer view as a rendering region.

<h1>funky Layout</h1>
<cfoutput>#renderView()#</cfoutput>

<hr>
<cfoutput>#renderView( "main/footer" )#</cfoutput>

If you are use to using cfinclude to reuse templates, think about it the same way. renderview() is a much more powerful cfinclude.

Using The Layout

Now, let's open the handler we created before called handlers/hello.cfc and add some code to use our new layout explicitly via adding a layout argument to our setView() call.

function index( event, rc, prc ){
    // param an incoming variable.
    event.paramValue( "name", "nobody" );
    // set a private variable
    prc.when = dateFormat( now(), "full" );

    // set the view to render with our new layout
    event.setView( view="hello/index", layout="Funky" );
}

Go execute the event now: http://localhost:{port}/hello/index and you will see the view rendered with the words funky layout and footer view at the bottom. Eureka, you have now created a layout.

You can also leverage the function event.setLayout( "Funky" ) to change layouts and even concatenate the calls:

event .setView( "hello/index" ) .setLayout( "Funky" );