I most definitely agree with your comments.

Basically I'm creating an ACL admin screen that shows a matrix in a table. The rows are controller / action names, and the columns are group names. Each cell contains a checkbox indicating whether that group can access the action/controller on that row.

When initially rendering the page I need to have some boxes checked depending on the current access. For example user 'Admin' will have all of its boxes checked when the page loads.

I have assigned 'groups' and 'resources' arrays to the view and I'm looping through them to build the table. When creating the checkboxes I want to do something like:

<?php ($this->isAllowed($group, $controller, $action)) ? 'checked="checked" : '' ?>

So I can do this with a view helper, which may be a good idea as later on I may only want to show an 'edit' or 'delete' button on my pages based on the same isAllowed function.

At the moment I'm sending an array to the view, but it's very messy. The above becomes:

<?php ($this->aclMatrix[$group . '_' . $controller . '_' . $action] == 1) ? 'checked="checked" : '' ?>

I think view helper is the way to go. I have only just realised that it would be useful outside of this page, which was the deciding factor in using one.

For interests sake though, I'd like feedback still. There'd have to be some time where it makes sense to have a function that only one view needs access to.