It’s all about the context…or better, $this->context!

It has great power and it should always be considered.

It’s the context.

No matter what, it always influences the topic under discussion, be it a specific dissertation, a discussion with other people or a PrestaShop (PS) module.

Well in the last case I learned it the hard way.

A few days ago I was writing my first 1.6 PS module and I found that something was wrong. I was setting a Smarty variable in an hook but it wasn’t showing in the template where the result of the hook call should have been printed.

The problem? Here:

$this->smarty->assign(array(...));

I was setting (assigning) my variable to the Smarty instance related to a specific hook and not the global one.

As a result, when I was trying to access the over mentioned variable in the template in which the result of the hook call should have been printed I kept on getting NULL.

To summarize I was setting a variable in the Smarty instance visible in the specific template related to the hook I relied on and not in the template in which the over mentioned should have been printed.

The solution? Here:

$this->context->smarty->assign(array(...));

In this way you’re sure to set a variable that will be present in all the templates considered during the handling of the hook you’re relying on.