Classes: keeping views from the business logic

[mopardude]

I was watching Stefan's vids on beginning class progamming over at the killerphp.com site. I get what he means about keeping the view code seperate from the business logic when creating classes. So does that mean it would be frowned upon to create a class that filled in table data for example? I mean I realize it is possible to program this, but like he said it is possible non-coders might have to make changes to the page like css or whatever. What would be the right way to handle this situation?

[falkencreative]

I think that's a situation that falls somewhere in the middle. It isn't frowned upon -- CodeIgniter has a HTML Table class that I have used often, and it's quite useful. http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/table.html

 

I think the goal is to ensure that the class doesn't generate any unnecessary/excess markup (unnecessary inline styling, classes/ids that are set by the class and aren't easily editable, etc.) If you need a way to set CSS classes on the table/table columns or rows, make those easy to edit by calling a function within the class, rather than having the PHP class itself set that data.