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The Context is a component first introduced with version 1.5 of PrestaShop. Its two goals are:
The Context is a registry for PHP variables that were previously accessed as globals. It aims to standardize the way these variables are accessed, and to make the code more robust by getting rid of global vars.
It is a light implementation of the Registry design pattern: it is a class that stores the main PrestaShop information, such as the current cookie, the customer, the employee, the cart, Smarty, etc.
These objects are always accessible through the context:
These objects are only accessible for the customer Context:
These objects are only accessible for the administrator Context:
From inside a Controller subclass or a Module subclass, the Context should be called with this shortcut: $this->context.
From anywhere else, you can get the Context instance by calling Context::getContext().
The context is initialized with data coming from the cookie or from the database. For example, to create the Language object, the context looks for an id_lang value in the cookie. If it doesn’t find one, it will retrieve the default language id from the database.