Using view strategies/renderers

Normally we will use the View to output HTML, but sometimes we want a more diverse way of outputting for example JSON or XML. This recipe will provide us with enough information to accomplish this easily.

Getting ready

We simply require the Zend Framework 2 skeleton application to get us going with this recipe. Nothing exotic is required.

How to do it…

Using different view strategies and renderers is a common practice in an application. In this recipe we'll explain how to do that.

Adding a view strategy

We can easily add a view strategy to our application by simply appending the view_manager configuration in the module configuration file (/module/Restful/config/module.config.php) as shown as follows:

<?php

return array(
  'view_manager' =>array(
    'strategies' => array(
      // This could also be ViewFeedStrategy if we want 
      // to output as a feed
      'ViewJsonStrategy',
    ),
  ),
);

The JSON strategy

If we receive output from the JSON strategy...