layouts - make a sibling my child

Question

lets say there's the following hierarchy of blocks:

<block name="parent">
    <block name="child" />
</block>

and I want to push a block of my own inside "parent", and put the original "child" as a child of my new block, eg:

<block name="parent">
    <block name="my_block">
        <block name="child" />
    </block>
</block>

how can I do it via layout xml?

I tried something like:

<reference name="parent">
     <block name="my_block">
           <action method="setChild"><name>child</name><block>child</block></action>
     </block>            
</reference>

but it didn't work (I tried calling getChildHtml('child'); ?> inside my template, and got an error.

am I doing it right? how do I update an existing block, add a block of my own, and turn one of the siblings (that were originally in parent) to be a child of my new block?

thanks!

Answer 1

Use insert or append instead of setChild, otherwise the block is not added to the sortedChildren array.

Also, you create a new block, "my_block", that replaces the old "my_block", instead of referencing the existing block.

Solution

 <reference name="my_block">
       <action method="append"><block>child</block></action>
 </reference>