How to set the view location in Joomla 4

Question

I'm rebuilding a component called DogWalk for Joomla 4 and I've tried to ensure I'm doing exactly what the core Banners component does. I've named and namespaced my files, named my directories identically to how Banners does it, but I can't get the BaseController to find my view file.

I'm dumping the $this->paths array from BaseController::createView, and the path is the same for Banners and for DogWalk:

array (size=1)
  'view' => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '/Users/mystuff/Sites/joomla4/administrator/components/com_dogwalk/views/'

However my component is looking for a file called mycomponentViewviewname while the actual view class name for Banners (and all the other admin components) is just HtmlView. Furthermore the Banners view class is found even though it's in View, not views (despite what $config array says).

How do I define where the controller will find my views, and what naming convention they would use?

Answer 1

The view file that your component is looking for MycomponentViewViewname which was used in the Joomla 3, so make sure you are extending the right controller class in your Controller(i.e Joomla\CMS\MVC\Controller\BaseController or any other class extending it such as AdminController). If it is from correct namespace track the setView() for any such changes that can cause the problem.

If this doesn't solve your problem then debugging the whole flow will be the option. But before that, I will suggest running the extension on some other fresh Joomla 4 setup on default parameters(as maybe some changes are affecting it such as code changes or plugin overrides).

If you are unable to find any solution you can override the setView() method in your controller as per your need(this should be the last option).

Hope this might help. Do let us know the solution once you find it.

Answer 2

Thanks to all who helped. The issue appears to have been the services file, not my pathing or namespacing. Once I added a file in administrator/services/provider.php it all started to work automagically. The file looked like this:

return new class implements ServiceProviderInterface
{
    /**
     * Registers the service provider with a DI container.
     *
     * @param   Container  $container  The DI container.
     *
     * @return  void
     *
     * @since   4.0.0
     */
    public function register(Container $container)
    {
        $container->registerServiceProvider(new MVCFactory('\\Mycompany\\Component\\Mycomponent'));
        $container->registerServiceProvider(new ComponentDispatcherFactory('\\Mycompany\\Component\\Mycomponent'));

        $container->set(
            ComponentInterface::class,
            function (Container $container)
            {
                $component = new CategoriesComponent($container->get(ComponentDispatcherFactoryInterface::class));

                $component->setMVCFactory($container->get(MVCFactoryInterface::class));
                $component->setRegistry($container->get(Registry::class));

                return $component;
            }
        );
    }
};

Another thing I needed to add was the generic DisplayController in both the admin and site Controller directory.