Professional CodeIgniter, Thomas Myer
Chapter 1: Welcome to the MVC World
13
In the following sections, you see how you ' d go about doing that. The examples provided in the next
few pages don ' t stop long enough to explain how to install and configure CodeIgniter (that ' s Chapter 3 )
or talk about all the advanced features like caching, routing, and the extensive libraries. The assumption
is that all that ' s been done for you, and that you have a properly working CodeIgniter environment. The
goal is to show you, at high speed, how a CodeIgniter application might look and behave.
First Things First: The Model
Depending on your work style, you may be inclined to tackle the views or controller first, but a good
place to start is the model. Why? Because the model serves as the data foundation for your entire web
application. Many of the controller ' s functions will rely on the model, so it ' s a good idea to have those
tools all ready to go.
All CodeIgniter models have the same initial structure:
<
?php
class Page_model extends Model{
function Page_model(){
parent::Model();
}
}
?
>
Notice that the name of the model (in this case, Page_model ) is both the name of the class and the name
of the initializing function. This file is stored in the /system/application/models/ folder of your project,
more than likely with a name like page_model.php . If this were the user model, you ' d likely call your
model User_model and store it in the file user_model.php.
Later in the book, you learn the ins and outs of placing and naming files. But here, you need to add a few
functions to your model. The first function is the code that retrieves the home page:
functions to your model. The first function is the code that retrieves the home page:
<
?php
class Page_model extends Model{
function Page_model(){
parent::Model();
}
function fetchHomePage(){
$data = array();
$options = array(`status' =
>
`live', `type'=
>
`home');
$q = $this-
>
db-
>
getwhere(`pages', $options, 1);
if ($q-
>
num_rows()
>
0){
$data = $q-
>
row_array();
}
return $data;
$q-
>
free_result();
}
}
?
>
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