Using a helper inside another helper

Published on February 19, 2007 and tagged with cakephp helper

If you write a helper you sometimes want to access functions of another helper. Let’s say you want to use the link() function of the HtmlHelper in your own helper. First you have to define the helper you want to use in the $helpers array:

class TestHelper extends AppHelper {
    var $helpers = array('Html');
}

You may expect that you could use the helper with $html->link(), but that leads to an “undefined variable” error (I blunder into this trap almost every time I use this functionality *g*). Instead you have to use $this->Html->link() as shown in the example:

class TestHelper extends AppHelper {
    var $helpers = array('Html');

    function getTheLink() {
        return $this->Html->link('The link', '/');
    }
}

12 comments baked

Kym January 07, 2009 at 04:07

Hey thanks so much, I was using it without $this!
cakebaker January 07, 2009 at 18:49

@Kym: You are welcome!
Dan July 16, 2009 at 07:45

Thanks for posting this. It was exactly what I was looking for as I wasn’t quite sure how to access a helper from within a helper.
cakebaker July 16, 2009 at 16:05

@Dan: I’m glad this article was helpful for you, and happy baking!
enrique September 14, 2009 at 11:52

Hi, thanks for the article!

Is it possible to request a helper inside a helper’s method? Same as you would do in a controller’s action instead of the entire controller?

function getTheLink() {
var $helpers[] = ‘Html’;

return $this->Html->link(‘The link’, ‘/’);
}
cakebaker September 14, 2009 at 17:21
@enrique: Thanks for your comment!

You could use something like:
```
function getTheLink() {
    App::import('Helper', 'Html');
    $this->Html = new HtmlHelper();

    return $this->Html->link('The link', '/');
}
```
And depending on the helper you want to load you have to do some initializations.

However, if possible, I would avoid this approach and use what I described in the article ;-)
brendan September 23, 2010 at 10:46

thanks for this, so simple but took ages to get this info, c’est la cake
cakebaker September 24, 2010 at 16:15

@brendan: You are welcome :)
Bill Tetley May 26, 2011 at 22:56

Thanks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a few hours already.
cakebaker May 30, 2011 at 16:18

@Bill: You are welcome :)
Rodrigo Silveira December 12, 2011 at 17:59

I tried what @enrique mentioned, since that method works on controllers just fine. But the only way I can get it to work is by using the original method mentioned in this post, which is by importing the helper to the entire helper class.
cakebaker December 20, 2011 at 18:08

@Rodrigo: To avoid loading the helper for the entire helper class, you can use the approach I posted as answer to @enrique’s comment.

Using a helper inside another helper

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