Templating with Require

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the last video, we templated out our header, all of our links, and
• 00:08 all this stuff at the top of our page.
• 00:10 In this video,
• 00:11 I wanna talk about using variables without declaring them on every page.
• 00:16 Now we've sort of talked about this with session variables that's not what I
• 00:19 wanna talk about.
• 00:19 We've also sort of talked about this with down here these form passing variables and
• 00:24 these hidden fields.
• 00:25 That's also not what I wanna talk about.
• 00:27 Instead, I wanna talk about creating our php on a different file and
• 00:32 sucking it in to a current file, and kinda weird to talk about it in the abstract so
• 00:36 let's just actually do this thing.
• 00:37 Come up here, right click and create a new file.
• 00:39 Let's call it random.php.
• 00:43 Okay so I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna grab this bit of code.
• 00:48 Actually I'm gonna grab all of this code right here.
• 00:50 And I'm gonna copy it, and I'm just gonna paste it into our random file here.
• 00:55 And let's see, don't need this.
• 01:01 Okay.
• 01:02 So if we save this, all this is doing is this file is just creating these two
• 01:06 random numbers that's naming them num1 and num2.
• 01:09 So if we come back to our index page, our addition page, up here at the top,
• 01:14 let's create another php tag.
• 01:16 Or we could've done it, actually, let's just do it like this.
• 01:23 Make it all one tag.
• 01:25 And let's go require and random.php.
• 01:30 Now if we save this and come up here and hit reload,
• 01:34 go to our addition page, nothing really has changed, right?
• 01:38 Well, since this random page doesn't have anything that it's outputting,
• 01:42 it's just creating variables.
• 01:43 It's not outputting anything.
• 01:45 If it was echoing these out, let's just echo them out and see what happens.
• 01:51 Save this, come back here now and hit reload.
• 01:53 We have these numbers up at the top of the screen, 3 and 10.
• 01:56 Well, that's not what we want.
• 01:58 So we don't wanna do that.
• 02:02 But these are still now available to us, so if we come back here to our index page,
• 02:07 we can get rid of this code right here.
• 02:11 So we're no longer generating random code on our index page.
• 02:15 What's happening is when index gets called, this require tag gets executed.
• 02:21 It opens up and runs this random.php file, and it generates our random numbers.
• 02:27 And now we can use these two variables Inside of this page however we want.
• 02:32 So we save all these stuff, come back here and hit reload.
• 02:35 7 + 2 = 9 if we submit that.
• 02:38 Yes 7 + 2 = 9, 7 + 3 = 22, wrong.
• 02:42 7 + 3 So our program continues to run 4 + 2 = 6,
• 02:47 8 + 6 = 324,234, 6 + 6 = 12.
• 02:51 So like I said, our program continues to run,but there's just a little
• 02:55 bit less code on our index page.
• 02:57 Now if we went through and did that for all of these pages there will be a little
• 03:01 bit less code on all of those pages and this is just one quick little example how
• 03:05 to abstract off something from your page onto a separate file.
• 03:08 And it's always sort of a good idea to keep your code on
• 03:12 one file in your HTML on another.
• 03:14 Because if you look at this HTML file.
• 03:17 Actually it's php file, but it's,
• 03:18 this is our HTML page, there's a lot of code going on here.
• 03:22 And it's not always a good idea to write your code right on a web page itself, for
• 03:26 just a lot of different reasons.
• 03:27 And using the require like this allows you to, like I said,
• 03:31 abstract that code to a separate file and also,
• 03:33 we could change this in the future if we want it on this just one file only, and
• 03:38 then it would, the change will appear on all of these different files if we went
• 03:43 through and create that require on each of these pages.
• 03:46 So just something I want you to sort of wrap your brain around, not terribly
• 03:49 important for this app, because it's such a small app, but it's an important part of
• 03:54 templating, keeping your code separate from your HTML and that's how you do it.
• 03:58 So two examples, one with include, one with require.
• 04:01 I tend to use include for things like visual stuff.
• 04:05 Links and headers stuff.
• 04:07 I tend to use require for code things that are necessary.
• 04:11 If our app doesn't generate these random numbers, it's good that it crashes, right?
• 04:16 And require, if require doesn't work right, it will crash your app, so
• 04:20 that's kind of a good thing in this case 'cause that stuff is necessary.
• 04:23 So that's all for this video.
• 04:25 In the next video we will finish things up.

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