Moving Presentation Logic Out of Views with Code Igniter - Review: returning values with a previous method (
Page 2 of 4 )
In the introduction, I mentioned that it’s possible to remove from a view the PHP loop that iterates over the database rows, based on the structure of the web application developed in the previous article. But before I show you how to do that, I’m going to reintroduce the full source code of this sample PHP program, so you can recall how it was developed initially.
That being said, here are all the files that comprise this web application:
(‘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
}
// generate web page using partial sections
function index(){
// generate header section
$data['header']=$this->load->view('header_view',array('header'=>'Header Section'),TRUE);
// generate content section
$data['content']=$this->load->view('content_view',array('users'=>$this->db->get('users')),TRUE);
// generate footer section
$data['footer']=$this->load->view('footer_view',array('footer'=>'Footer Section'),TRUE);
// generate full web page
$this->load->view('main_page',$data);
}
}
?>
(‘main_page.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">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Sample Web Page</title>
<style type="text/css">
body{
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
background: #999;
}
#container{
width: 600px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
#header{
padding: 10px;
background: #eee;
}
#content{
padding: 10px;
background: #9cf;
}
#footer{
padding: 10px;
background: #eee;
}
h1{
font: bold 2em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
margin: 0 0 18px 0;
color: #039;
}
h2{
font: bold 1.5em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
margin: 0 0 18px 0;
}
p{
font: normal .8em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
margin: 0 0 18px 0;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<?php
echo $header.$content.$footer;
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>
(‘header_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)
<div id="header">
<h1><?php echo $header;?></h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut.</p>
</div>
(‘content_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)
<div id="content">
<?php if($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>
(‘footer_view.php’ file - located at /application/views/ folder)
<div id="footer">
<h2><?php echo $footer;?></h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut.</p>
</div>
Having listed all of the source files that compose the MySQL-driven application built during the previous tutorial of this series, it’s worthwhile to stress one point regarding the way it’s been structured: as you can see, within the “content_view.php” view file there’s a “foreach” construct that loops over the rows fetched from a “users” MySQL table.
This is a valid approach, used frequently for constructing views. However, it’s also feasible to implement a little twist here and remove the loop from this specific view, in this way increasing the level of separation between the application’s logic and its visual presentation even more.
Provided that you’re interested in learning how to turn the concept deployed above into functional code, in the next section I’ll be creating a brand new view file, in addition to modifying slightly the signature of the “WebPage” controller class.
Click on the link below and continue reading.
