I have a function that I add to most of my data types that looks like this:
function has($field)
{
return !empty($this->{$field});
}
I use this to determine at the template level whether or not a specific field has any data, because sometimes the template will require different display logic if it doesn't. For instance:
<% if has(Email) %>
$Email
<% else %>
$Phone
<% end_if %>
My question is, first of all, is this a common practice, or is there an easier way? Secondly, how come when I had this function in my controller it was throwing a PHP error on the template syntax, but when I moved it to my data model, it worked fine? Aren't all template functions supposed to be in the controller? Weird.