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Automatically Assigning a Parent Block via. Layout XML

astorm

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So here’s something I didn’t know about until 15 minutes ago. When you’re creating a Layout Update XML block, you can automatically assign a block you’ve created as a child of another block with a parent attribute in your block tag. That means this

<block type="foo/bar" parent="block_name_in_layout" ... />

is sort of like the following (oversimplified) PHP code

$block = $layout->createBlock('foo/bar');
$parent = $layout->getBlock('block_name_in_layout');
$parent->insert($block)

Or the more verbose Layout XML code

<reference name="block_name_in_layout">
    <block type="foo/bar" ... />
</reference>

Props to a benmarks tweet I ran across that made me think he was drunk until I peeked at app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout.php

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Originally Posted: 8th December 2011

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