Unit testing complete. There were 0 failures and 0 errors from 1971 tests and 11142 assertions.
Checkstyle analysis reported 199 warnings and 0 errors.

Could you propose a solution that include the test on empty($this->_name) ? ie:

    if (empty($this->_name))
    {
        if (array_key_exists('name', $config))
        {
            $this->_name = $this->name = $config['name'];
        }
        else
        {
            $this->_name = $this->getName();
        }
    }
    else
    {
        $this->name = $this->_name;
    }

Shouldn't it always be empty? It's in the constructor.

It could have been set in the declaration of the class

The actual issue is that $this->name has been introduced without wiring it up.

Is _name supposed to be private or protected? Either way we should use it the way we want to use it in the long term and use __set() and __get() for b/c for 2.5.

Trying to implement a __get() method in JView I get a
Notice: Indirect modification of overloaded property has no effect
followed by a
Fatal error: Cannot assign by reference to overloaded object
both from JView::asignRef() that also does a check if the first character is a _ :(

Looking at $name and $_name, turns out that both are in use but $name has never been declared:

<?php
class JView extends JObject
{
    public function __construct($config = array())
    {
        // Set the view name
        if (empty($this->_name))
        {
            if (array_key_exists('name', $config))
            {
                $this->_name = $config['name'];
            }
            else
            {
                $this->_name = $this->getName();
            }
        }
...
    }

    public function getName()
    {
        if (empty($this->name))
        {
            $r = null;
            if (!preg_match('/View((view)*(.*(view)?.*))$/i', get_class($this), $r))
            {
                JError::raiseError(500, JText::_('JLIB_APPLICATION_ERROR_VIEW_GET_NAME'));
            }
            if (strpos($r[3], "view"))
            {
                JError::raiseWarning('SOME_ERROR_CODE', JText::_('JLIB_APPLICATION_ERROR_VIEW_GET_NAME_SUBSTRING'));
            }
            $this->name = strtolower($r[3]);
        }

        return $this->name;
    }

}

So there is definitely something more here.

@janschoenherr Could you give an example of

...the default template search path might be wrong

?

@elkuku sure:

If I create an instance of a subclass of JView

class FooView extends JView {

and pass the constructor an array with the name

new FooView(array('name' => 'bar'))

the constructor of JView sets

$this->_name = 'bar'

then continues to

$this->_setPath('template', $this->_basePath . '/views/' . $this->getName() . '/tmpl');

and here it calls

$this->getName()

this returns empty, because $this->name is not set yet and the name is not being retrieved from the class name.

You'll end up with something like

$this->_setPath('template', $this->_basePath . '/views//tmpl');

but expect something like

$this->_setPath('template', $this->_basePath . '/views/bar/tmpl');

This has been fixed in #1144 in a different way. Thanks for contributing!