What is the MVC Pattern?

MVC (Model-View-Controller) is an architectural pattern used mostly in many OOP frameworks, like Laravel or Symfony, to break up code into three logical components that serve very specific purposes. Those components are:

• model – represents the data or business logic.
• view – the visualization of the data to the client (browser) or presentation logic.
• controller – handles the request, process data, and load the appropriate view.

Let’s see the MVC interaction in the diagram below:

Now, it’s the time for a quick demo.

MVC Demo

In this demo, we’ll be printing the student info.

Let’s create a simple .php file that will link the model to the view (this is a controller).

student.php

<?php
// Make the model available
include 'StudentModel.php';

// Create an instance
$studentModel = new StudentModel();
// Get the list of student
$studentList = $studentModel ->getAllStudents();

// Show the view
include 'student-list.php';

We can create a class that represents our model.

StudentModel.php

<?php
class StudentModel 
{
  // Because we don't have a db, let's hard code data
   private $data = array(
      "abel" => array(
         "fullName" => "Abel Mbula" ,
         "point" => 90,
         "grade" => "A"
       ),
       "pati" => array(
         "fullName" => "Patience Kavira" ,
         "point" => 80,
         "grade" => "B"
       ),
       "salimas" => array(
         "fullName" => "Sarah Lifaefi" ,
         "point" => 95,
         "grade" => "A"
       )
   )

   function getAllStudent() {
        return $data;
    }

}

Since what we’re doing is simple, we only have one method (getAllStudent), but you can add as many as you want.

Now, we can create our view.

student-list.php

<?php foreach ($studentList as $key => $student): ?>

      - Name: <?= $student['fullName']; ?>, 
        Point: <?= $student["point"]; ?>,
        Grade: <?= $student["grade"]; ?><br>
 
<?php endforeach; ?>

Let’s put everything together and see how it works.