Addon Module call template help

I have been trying to do the good old search and have found plenty of ways of doing what I want... just not where I want to do it, so I finally got to the point of just reaching out to the community.

I am looking at developing an addon and for the most part everything seems simple enough although I am trying to use an template file for part of the admin output and i'm struggling to achieve what I want.

The documentation (https://developers.whmcs.com/addon-modules/admin-area-output/) mentions:

"Things aren’t limited to just one file. Use the _output function to include other files, call templates, etc. The system is flexible."

which I took to mean that I can call a smarty template .tpl file although currently I am at a loss as to how I should be calling it, can anyone give me a quick couple of lines as to whether "templates" actually means smarty templates and how I should make the call.

Something crude like:

$thepage = file_get_contents('/home/user/public_html/dev/modules/addons/theaddon/admin/admin.tpl');

echo $thepage;

works for displaying html although i'd prefer to be able to:

pass {$smarty} variables.

Keeping design and functionality separate.

Appreciate any direct examples, ideas or just pointers in the right direction.

You can pass smarty variables to the admin area itself

Take a look at AdminAreaPage, this is an excellent way to assign smarty variables to the system. You can most likely assign the template page there too, though I haven't tried doing that, specifically

You can pass smarty variables to the admin area itself

Take a look at AdminAreaPage, this is an excellent way to assign smarty variables to the system. You can most likely assign the template page there too, though I haven't tried doing that, specifically

Thanks for trying to help although I guess my title is a little misleading as I am not trying to hook into the admin area, I am trying to work with an Addon modules blog_output($vars) and call a template rather than just echo ''; my presentation where I would prefer to keep just functionality.

So for anyone else scratching their head, passing everything statically obviously wasn't sitting well with me so echo $theHtmlFile; was never going to be a "proper" solution.

Seeing as I already had access to smarty for right or wrong I ended up going with the following in order to use templates that are able to use smarty variables:

   $smarty = new Smarty();
   $smarty->assign('version', $vars['version']);
   $smarty->assign('otherVars', 'thatYouNeed');
   $smarty->caching = false;
   $smarty->compile_dir = $GLOBALS['templates_compiledir'];
   $smarty->display(dirname(__FILE__) . '/admin/admin.tpl');

To give full credit where credit is due I finally used an obscure enough search term to get a stackoverflow question from 2013 and the above is identical (functionally) to the answer given by Akahadaka.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14246279/whmcs-addon-module-admin-section-template