Fix wrong view path resolving in ZF

I've created 40 to 50 projects based on Zend Framework 2. As you can imagine, while working on those projects I've created lots of modules myself.

One or two times a ran into a strange problem, which only occured under certain circumstances. I digged deep into the code of Zend Framework to find the solution and I wanna share it in this post and hope it helps you, if you ever run into this problem, too.

The problem

I've created a module with a camel-cased-name, like ModuleCamelCased. I created all the folders and filled the config with a routing- and a controller-definition. Everything as usual. The controller had an index-action.

When I requested the route in my browser I got the exception, that the view-file couldn't be found for this action. But it was there. In the exception I noticed the resolver didn't look for module-camel-cased/index/index.phtml but instead for module-camel-cased/controller/index/index.phtml. I've never experienced it before - why did the resolver put the controller into the path, where it looks for the view-file?

The configuration

Up to this point I had the following configuration set in my config/module.config.php:

<?php
// module.config.php
return [
    'controllers' => [
        'aliases' => [
            'ModuleCamelCased\Controller\Index' => \ModuleCamelCased\Controller\IndexController::class
        ],
        'invokables' => [
            \ModuleCamelCased\Controller\IndexController::class => \ModuleCamelCased\Controller\IndexController::class
        ]
    ],
    'router' => [
        'routes' => [
            'test' => [
                'type' => 'Literal',
                'options' => [
                    'route' => '/test',
                    'defaults' => [
                        '__NAMESPACE__' => '\ModuleCamelCased\Controller',
                        'controller' => 'index',
                        'action' => 'index'
                    ]
                ]
            ]
        ]
    ],
    'view_manager' => [
        'template_path_stack' => [
            __DIR__ . '/../view'
        ]
    ]
];

This as I said resulted in the exception, that ZF couldn't find the template module-camel-cased/controller/index/index.phtml.

The solution

What I wanted was the resolver to search for module-camel-cased/index/index.phtml instead of module-camel-case/controller/index/index.phtml. The solution was rather simple in the end. In the routing-configuration just remove the first backslash in the __NAMESPACE__ of the defaults:

    'router' => [
        'routes' => [
            'test' => [
                'type' => 'Literal',
                'options' => [
                    'route' => '/test',
                    'defaults' => [
                        '__NAMESPACE__' => 'ModuleCamelCased\Controller',
                        'controller' => 'index',
                        'action' => 'index'
                    ]
                ]
            ]
        ]
    ],

Conclusion

When specifying a __NAMESPACE__-key within the defaults of a route-config, dismiss the first backslash of the namespace.

I hope this helps you!