In-Template Response Building

I am fond of saying that in server-side applications, the Template is not the View. Instead, the HTTP Response is the View. That is, the Response presented by the server is not only the templated content; the presentation includes both the headers and the content in the Response.

But what if you can build the HTTP Response inside a Template?

That is just what the new Qiq helpers using Sapien, let you do. Using the qiq/helper-sapien package, you can set Response headers, cookies, etc. from inside your template code …

{{ response()->setVersion('1.1') }}
{{ response()->setCode(200) }}
{{ response()->setHeader('content-type', 'text/plain') }}
Hello, world!

… and get back a complete Response object for sending:

$response = $template->response()->render($template);
$response->send();

In addition, you can use setFile() to build a file-download Response …

{{ response()->setFile('/path/to/file.txt') }}

… or setJson() to build a JSON Response:

{{ response()->setJson(['foo' => 'bar']) }}

Does this mean the Template is the View after all? If so, it’s only because the entire Response is built by the Template. Perhaps this could be called a ResponseView.

Will this make a Qiq template into a complete ADR Responder? Maybe, maybe not — but it does mean that Responder implementations have the option to hand off most or all Response-building work to Qiq template code.