You may know that every controller’s action in Zend Framework has to be bind to a view. Normally you can disable the view for a specific action, but how about “forking” an action to render different views?!

In example when some _GET parameter is set redirect to another view? That’s rather strange and perhaps there’s a clear and yet full MVC solution! First of all you can setup all of the view variables simply in the “parent” action.

view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
	}
}

Than the view file will contain something like:

// index/index.phtml
title ?>

Than whenever you have the given _GET set you can _forward to another action (perhaps with no code at all) and only a different view. Thus you don’t setup twice the view variables.

view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
		
		if (isset($_GET['my_param'])) {
			$this->_forward('another');
		}
	}
	
	public function anotherAction()
	{}
}

And there are two views practically for one action:

// index/index.phtml
title ?>

// index/another.phtml
title ?>