how to assign a javascript variable to a smarty variable

Question

I got a problem regarding how to assign a java script variable to a smarty variable. Here is the code snippet.

function getDateInfo(date, wantsClassName)
{           


        

Answer 1

For anything AJAX with PHP, I'd propose the xajax library:

http://www.xajax-project.org/

Using xajax, you register a PHP function to be exposed to your client side JS code. By magic, if you call registered functions in JS, xajax packs the request with parameters and passes it back to the server.

Moreover, you are able to push more than update from your PHP code to the browser. Something like 'Replace element X with ... and replace element Y with ...' in a single XHR reply.

xajax makes AJAX style code very clean.

Answer 2

You can't assign a client-side value to a smarty variable, as smarty is a templating language that runs on the server. Smarty assignments can only be done on the server-side, that is to say, from PHP. E.g.:

$smarty->assign('timestamp',time());

So what you can do is something like:

    $smarty->assign('timestamp',time()); //in your PHP script

    //in your JS
    var currentTS = {$timestamp};

See http://www.smarty.net/manual/en/api.assign.php