unclear views

Hello,

i'm new to cakePHP and struggling with the MVC pattern in my views. According to the cakePHP book there are e.g. Helpers in the views to easily format the data.
My problem is, that my views get more and more complex like winding pathes. In practical use combining data is necessary very often in views, for example "Amount: € 100,00 from 01.01.2015 to 31.12.2015" (the currency and the dates are variables). For the formatting i use the NumberHelper and the TimeHelper, but because i'm inside the view i also have to check if the variables are empty or even set to prevent undefined index errors during development and later results like "Amount: € from to". So i add a lot of if-branches to suppress the rendering of the static elements in the view in case of empty variables. Due to tree structures and array indexes in the variables the names are often longer than short and makes the view code difficult to read. This problem becomes even more critical due to higher-level branches:

<table>
    <tr>
    <?php if () {  // Begin If-Block ?>
    <td>
    <?php //... ?>
    </td>
    <?php } else { // Begin Else-Block ?>
    <td>
    <?php //... ?>
    </td>          
    <?php } // End If-Else-Block ?>
    </tr>
</table>

Of course the tables are much more bigger and complex with many rows and columns in real life and in combination with all the other branches the view gets more and more hard to read and maintain.
So i thought about parsing the string in the controller and then just render this complete string in the view, but the Helpers seems to be located in the views, so i'm not sure how to do it and if this would be a good idea. But apart from this there is still the problem with the higher-level branches...i thought about rendering different views in the controller, but then i end up with a lot of duplicate code which is also difficult to maintain.
I hope that someone with enough experience can tell me if there is a way to keep complex views at a more manageable level.

Greetings
Karl Klammer

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