Review: loading view files sequentially with CodeIgniter - PHP

Welcome to the second installment of a series that shows you how to handle views with CodeIgniter. Made up of seven parts, this series explains different methods that you may use for loading view files within your CI-based web applications, ranging from working with a simple sequential approach, to including views within other views. This part will show you how to improve your web page's appearance with CSS.

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By: Alejandro Gervasio

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March 26, 2009

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If you don’t have the time to take a look at the example developed in the preceding article, where I explained how to build a basic web document by loading sequentially three different views, here’s the full source code from that example, so you can rapidly grasp how it works.

(definition of ‘webpage.php’ file – located at /application/controllers/ folder)

<?php

class WebPage extends Controller{

function WebPage(){

// load controller parent

parent::Controller();

// load libraries here

$this->load->database();

// load helpers here

}

// load views sequentially

function index(){

// load 'header' view

$this->load->view('header_view',array('header'=>'Header Section'));

// load 'content' view and pass database content

$this->load->view('content_view',array('users'=>$this->db->get('users')));

// load 'footer' view

$this->load->view('footer_view',array('footer'=>'Footer Section'));

}

(definition of ‘header_view.php’ file- located at /application/views/ folder)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

<title>Sample Web Page</title>

</head>

<body>

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.</p>

</div>

(definition of ‘content_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

<?php if($users->num_rows > 0):?>

<?php foreach($users->result() as $user):?>

<p><strong>First Name: </strong><?php echo $user->firstname;?></p>

<p><strong>Last Name: </strong><?php echo $user->lastname;?></p>

<p><strong>Email: </strong><?php echo $user->email;?></p>

<hr />

<?php endforeach;?>

<?php endif;?>

</div>

(definition of ‘footer_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)

</div>

</body>

</html>

These are all the files required for building a basic web page whose main section has been populated with contents fetched from a “users” MySQL table. In this specific situation, the views corresponding to the header, content section and footer were loaded sequentially by the “WebPage” controller listed above.

Now that you hopefully recalled how to load views in a sequential way with CI, it’s time to improve the visual presentation of the web page generated previously. To do so, I’m simply going to incorporate into this page a few CSS styles, but the details of this process will be discussed in the section to come.

Therefore, click on the link below and read the following segment, please.

Next: Enhancing the look and feel of view files with CSS styles >>