Starting to work with FigDice in your project is simple.

Installation

Choose among the 3 methods below, which suits better your needs: Composer, Phar, or Zip file.

1. Composer

Simply add the following composer.json file to your project root, or append the "require" section to your existing composer.json file:

{
  "require": {
    "figdice/figdice": "*"
  }
}

Then run the following command in your project folder:

php composer.phar install

The \figdice namespace will automatically become available thanks to the autoload Composer feature.

2. Phar

Download the latest FigDice phar file to the location of your choice. Then, in your source files where you need to use FigDice features, write the line:

require_once 'phar:///path/to/figdice-2.0.1.phar';

The phar file's stub registers an autoload function for the classes in the \figdice namespace. Notice that, if you already have an old-style __autoload function, you must register it with spl_autoload_register before importing the phar.

3. Zip

Download the latest Figdice zip file to the location of your choice and extract the archive. Then you have two options:

***3.1 Manual includes ***

In the your source files where you need to use FigDice features, include the necessary files:

require_once '/path/to/figdice-2.0.2/View.php';
require_once '/path/to/figdice-2.0.2/Feed.php';
require_once '/path/to/figdice-2.0.2/Filter.php';

at the minimum. Notice that some Exceptions and helper classes might need require despite you don't use them explicitly in your code.

***3.2 Autoload ***

Simply require_once the autoload.php file at the root of the FigDice folder.

Getting Started

Instanciate a Fig View:

$figView = new \figdice\View();

Register your Feed provider:

$feedFactory = new MyFeedFactory();
$figView->registerFeedFactory( $feedFactory );

And load and render your XML template:

$figView->loadFile( 'my-template.xml' );
echo $figView->render();

The Feed Factory is the class you define, which will provide an instance of the Feeds that your template pulls with instruction:

<fig:feed class="\your\FeedClass" target="mountPoint" />

It is responsible for identifying which file needs loading, and for creating a new instance of the \figdice\Feed derived class of yours, which handles the data gathering as per the template's request.

See Documentation for more details.

Unit Tests

You can run the PHPUnit suite from the root of the source folder:

phpunit --bootstrap ./autoload.php ./test