Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

It’s still awesome, but so many blogging options and I suck at sticking to 1 thing.

Posted via email from richtestani’s posterous

CodeIgniter has been my choice of PHP framework over the last year. It’s actually really the first one I’ve ever used and because of it’s simplicity, excellent documentation and easy to add classes, it made an excellent framework to get up and running.

One of the early and helpful techniques you want to pick up is extending the base controller. By default, your own controllers extend CodeIgniters Controller class. This might be fine for small sites, but if your site even a little complex there is no doubt that you will want to have every page do some initial routines to maybe process an existing user, check the state of sessions and so forth.

It would be a lot of work to have to maintain something like this on every controller file you created, plus adding in new controllers would likely be error prone. With the following setup, you have a preset way your application loads.

The solution is the extend the base Controller. It’s a simple process, but every time I do this, I always forget a step or miss something small that takes me some time to remember why something was not working. So here is how you do it.

CodeIgniter has a default subclass prefix setting which you must adhere to when you extend any class in CI. By default the prefix is ‘MY_’. You can modify this in application/config/config.php. This setting requires you to name your class starting with whatever setting you use here.

If I wanted to have my classes prefixed with RT_, I would make that the setting there. Now I would name all my classes like: RT_Controller or RT_Sessions if I wanted to extend the sessions class.

The next step is creating the subclass. Your controller subclass belongs in application/libraries. This class will extend the base Controller and be named based on your prefix you configured above.

class RT_Controller extends Controller {

   public function RT_Controller() {

     parent::Controller();

  }

}

The above class is now set to be your base controller. For any controller you create, you would place them into /application/controllers and extend your base controller.

class Home extends RT_Controller {

 public function Home() {

  parent::RT_Controller();

 }

}

Notice her we are calling the parent RT_Controller, and not Controller.

Troubleshooting

If you are getting an error such as “cannot find RT_Controller in Home…”, chances are your file is named using all lower case. On Linux systems, files are case sensitive, and files are named the same as the class being instanced so you would need to rename your file RT_Controller.php.

Another issue might be the location of your main controller. It needs to be in your application/libraries directory because the of the way CI loads, it will check here for any files with your prefix first, otherwise the standard CI controller will load.

Here’s the clip: