Deprecation: #94209 - Backend ModuleLayout ViewHelpers

See forge#94209

Description

The following Fluid ViewHelpers have been deprecated:

  • be:moduleLayout
  • be:moduleLayout.menu
  • be:moduleLayout.menuItem
  • be:moduleLayout.button.linkButton
  • be:moduleLayout.button.shortcutButton

These ViewHelpers partially mimic their counterparts of the PHP based ModuleTemplate API. They were previously used in backend modules when the 'doc header' handling was done in Fluid.

The ViewHelpers however relied on knowledge that shouldn't be the scope of a view component, especially variables like the current action and controller had to be assigned to the view in many cases.

Additionally, those ViewHelpers were only a sub set of the ModuleTemplate functionality and created a second API for the same problem domain and various scenarios like good shortcut implementation and main drop down state were hard to solve when using these ViewHelpers.

Impact

Using these ViewHelpers will trigger a PHP E_USER_DEPRECATED error.

Affected Installations

Some extensions with backend modules may use these ViewHelpers. Searching templates for string be:moduleLayout should reveal usages. Extensions extending the PHP classes are found by the extension scanner as a weak match.

Migration

In general, extensions using these ViewHelpers should switch to using the PHP API based on class \TYPO3\CMS\Backend\Template\ModuleTemplate , usually initialized by class \TYPO3\CMS\Backend\Template\ModuleTemplateFactory instead. All Core extensions that render backend modules provide usage examples and the fluent API is quite straight forward.

Using the be:moduleLayout ViewHelper always rendered FlashMessages from the queue 'extbase.flashmessages.' . $pluginNamespace on top of the content area. You can either use the f:flashMessages ViewHelper or \TYPO3\CMS\Backend\Template\ModuleTemplate::setFlashMessageQueue() as replacements.

For Extbase base backend modules, the 'doc header' should be handled within controller actions, while the module body is rendered by the Fluid view component.

In case an extension heavily relies on the deprecated ViewHelpers and the functionality should be kept with as little work as possible, the easiest way is of course to simply copy the according ViewHelpers to the extension directly and to just adapt the namespace in templates accordingly.