Need Help Determining How to Alter Function to Eliminate Missing Argument Warning

Question

When developing a Joomla 2.5 Component, I have loaded an image using the following function:

public function iconButton( $link, $image ) {

    $lang    = &JFactory::getLanguage();
    $button = '';
    if ($lang->isRTL()) {
        $button .= '';
    } else {
        $button .= '';
    }
    $button .=    ''
               .'<a href="'.$link.'" target="_blank">'
               .JHTML::_('image', 'administrator/components/com_mycomponent/assets/images/'.$image )
               .'</a>'
               .'';
    $button .= '';

    return $button;
}

I am now testing this image on a live site and I get the following error message:

Warning: Missing argument 2 for JHtml::image() in ../public_html/libraries/joomla/html/html.php on line 474

Upon investigating the path from the warning I have found the following on line 474:

public static function image($file, $alt, $attribs = null, $relative = false, $path_only = false)

Here is the call on the view which is creating the warning:

echo MyComponentHelper:: iconButton( $link, 'myimage.png' );

This leads me to believe that I need to add the $alt variable into my custom iconButton function to clear out this error. I have attempted several variations of this myself but have not yet cracked the code. Any idea on a simple way to clear this out?

Answer 1

The simplest way to clear out the error would be to just add an empty string as an additional parameter:

.JHTML::_('image', 'administrator/components/com_mycomponent/assets/images/'.$image, '')

Obviously, that's not a great alt tag for the image to have, but it shouldn't have an error anymore.

You could also add it as a parameter to the function but set a default value for it in your function, so you could set it appropriately in the future but still clear the error for all existing uses of the function like so:

public function iconButton( $link, $image, $alt='' ) {

    $lang    = &JFactory::getLanguage();
    $button = '';
    if ($lang->isRTL()) {
        $button .= '';
    } else {
        $button .= '';
    }
    $button .=    ''
               .'<a href="'.$link.'" target="_blank">'
               .JHTML::_('image', 'administrator/components/com_mycomponent/assets/images/'.$image, $alt )
               .'</a>'
               .'';
    $button .= '';

    return $button;
}