Output plugin result as template tag

Question

I have read ExpressionEngine documents and I am fairly comfortable while creating plugins. However I had a requirement in which I wanted my plugin to output data as a template tags. Like,

{exp:awesome_plugin}
    {awesome}{awesome} {!-- outputs the data set for awesome tag. --}
    {really}{really}
{/exp:awesome_plugin}

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes this is possible. It took me a while to find some documentation when I first tried to do it within a plugin. You need to look at the docs for the template class instead of the plugin API. Specifically the section for variable pairs.

You need to create a multidimensional array that contains the different rows for your variable pair. Here's some relevant sections from a plugin I wrote that displays a gallery that's created using matrix, assets and playa. I've simplified it a lot but hopefully you will get the idea.

In the first bit of code I've done a database query to get my assets and then looped through the results to create the variable pair array:

$assets_array = array();
if ($assets_query->num_rows() != 0)
{
  // loop through assets and create an array indexed with the associated matrix row_id
  foreach ($assets_query->result() as $row)
  { 
    $assets_array[$row->row_id][] = array('image_url' => $this->EE->typography->parse_file_paths($row->file_path),
                                  'alt_text' => $row->alt_text
                                          );
  }
}

When I create the single vars for the main tag, I loop through the query result for the matrix rows and create a var that contains the assets array.

foreach ($matrix_query->result() as $row)
{
    $vars[] = array(
       'row_id'       => $row->row_id,
       'entry_id'     => $row->entry_id,
       'image'        => $assets_array[$row->row_id],
    );
}

$this->return_data =  $this->EE->TMPL->parse_variables($this->EE->TMPL->tagdata, $vars);

Then in my template I can do something like this:

{exp:sp_gallery}
    {image}<img src="{image_url}" alt="{alt_text}"{/image}
{/exp:sp_gallery}

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Yes, you can use the Template Class for it. See here how to create paired tags:

http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/development/usage/template.html#parsing-variables