CodeIgniter - Code repetition and passing variables to functions

Question

I have the following code in a controller:

<?php

class Student extends CI_Controller
{

function index()
{
    $data = $this->init->set();
    
    $this->parser->parse('include/header', $data);
    $this->parser->parse('student/student_index', $data);
    $this->parser->parse('include/footer', $data);
}

function planner()
{
    $data = $this->init->set();
    
    $this->parser->parse('include/header', $data);
    $this->parser->parse('student/student_cal', $data);
    $this->parser->parse('include/footer', $data);      
}

}
?>

As you can see, there's a lot of repetition here. Basically all of it. I already put my variables in a model so I only have to call the model function each time instead of putting the whole $data array at the start of each function. Anyway, I tried to reduce the repetition here by doing the following:

<?php

class Student extends CI_Controller
{

function index()
{
    $data = $this->init->set();
    
    $this->parser->parse('include/header', $data);
    
    switch($this->uri->segment(2))
    {
        case '': $this->home($data); break;
        case 'planner': $this->planner($data); break;
    }
    $this->parser->parse('include/footer', $data);
}

function home($data)
{
    $this->parser->parse('student/student_index', $data);
}


function planner($data)
{
    $this->parser->parse('student/student_cal', $data);
}

}
?>

This, somehow, works fine for my homepage. It parses the variables and there's no problem whatsoever. However, on the 'planner' page, I get errors:

Message: Missing argument 1 for Student::planner()

Message: Undefined variable: data

Message: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

I'm quite sure I get these errors because the function somehow doesn't receive the $data array. I also read in the CI docs that the third segment in a URL gets passed as argument, and in this case the third segment is non-existent, thus nothing gets passed. However, the CI docs didn't tell me how I could pass my $data array from the index() function to my planner() function. I also wonder why the home function works fine, without errors.

Anther · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-12 13:11:11Z

Now, I don't see the reason for that refactoring if it's going to make the code really hard to look at. I'm not entirely sure what the parse function does, so the way I changed it was to actually pass the parameter as a string, but preferably I'd load the content into a buffer and pass it in that way. But here's some cleaner and hopefully readable removable of the duplication... and hopefully it works :).



class Student extends CI_Controller
{

  private function load_student_page($content){
      $data = $this->init->set();

      $this->parser->parse('include/header', $data);
      $this->parser->parse($content, $data);
      $this->parser->parse('include/footer', $data);

  }

  function index()
  {
    $this->load_student_page('student/student_index');
  }

  function planner()
  {
    $this->load_student_page('student/student_cal');
  }

}

TaylorOtwell · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-11 18:45:37Z

2

Like you said, CodeIgniter is trying to pass the third segment in as a parameter, but it doesn't exist.

You may need to use a "_remap" function.

class Student extends CI_Controller {

    public function _remap($method, $parameters)
    {
         $data = $this->init->set();
         $this->parser->parse('include/header', $data);

         switch($this->uri->segment(2))
         {
             case '': $this->home($data); break;
             case 'planner': $this->planner($data); break;
         }

         $this->parser->parse('include/footer', $data);
    }

}

answered Apr 11, 2011 at 18:45

TaylorOtwell

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1 Comment

Joris Ooms Over a year ago

Hmm, I tried this but I couldn't get it to work. I guess I'll mess around with it later; kinda lost some time trying that other 'solution' here. I was looking into the _remap function earlier, but it wouldn't really do what I wanted it to do. Perhaps I was using it wrong! :) I'll take a look at it again, and perhaps look up some templates.. I guess I really don't get this framework :(

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