I was wondering if there is a best practice for static pages in one controller. I thought about a PageController that handles all the pages. What is the best practice to do this dynamically? The pages only contain some text and html.
Generally it is personal preference as to where you want to put them, in a big system I will put them within a controller where they are relevant eg. If I have a TasksController and I have a static tasks information page, that would be within the TasksController. If it is a forward facing part of the system I generally have a WebsiteController which deals with anything visible to the public.
Another potential way is to redirect on the route itself using something like :
Route::view('/taskinfo', 'tasks.information');
It's really a matter of what best works for you. I prefer the first option.
You can achieved same on below code -
Route -
Route::get('/information/{id}','InformationController#show');
Controller Function -
public function show($id,Request $request)
{
$data = array();
$static_page_names = ['static1','static2']; //array that contains all static pages name
if(in_array($id, $static_page_names)){
//static page code here
return view('/pages/static_page_template',$data);
}else{
//dynamic code here
return view('/pages/dynamic_page_template',$data);
}
}
You can access the page from browser like-
website-url/information/id or website/information/static-page-name
Might be it will helpfull to you
Related
I'm currently creating an app with Codeigniter and i came up with this issue (and it's not the first time to be honest).
What i want is to set a value in a global variable in function "foo()" and the access it through function "bar" (which is called through ajax call from client side).
In short, i want this variable to be full when the user has visited the page (sth like a session).
Here's an example code of my controller and what i'm trying to achieve:
class Groups extends CI_Controller{
private $page_id;
public function foo($slug = FALSE){
$this->load->model('some_model');
$info = $this->some_model->get_info($slug);
$this->page_id = $info['page_id'];
}
public function bar(){
$this->load->model('some_model');
$info = $this->some_model->get_some_other_info($this->page_id);
//Some code in here
}
}
Any suggestions or best practices on achieve that?
I've tried searching the internet on that but i couldn't find something to start with. So if you have any suggestions on where to look at, feel free to do it!
Thanks
If i understand it right you will have 2 calls. One will be at page load where you want to store something and after that there will be an ajax call that will retrieve what you have stored. Because the 2 script loads are different you can only do it by storing the data to one of them: database/session/cookie/html session or localstorage.
Can't say anything about best practice because i dont know what you want to store and for how long so need a bit more info about your code (im guessing you want to store the "page_id"?).
This being the worst title imaginable, let me explain my concern as best as I can. So basically in my framework I use URLs of the type site.com/controller/method/parameters
I'll take this page for example site.com/news/edit/12
Then, if I apply no routing, my controller's name has to be News, the called method will be edit with a single parameter 12. Then if, for the sake of demonstrating my concern, I decide to do editing of the news title and body in different pages, I would have to navigate to site.com/news/edit/12/title. Which is where it gets messy and is basically what I want to ask:
What is the proper way of including pages that depend on parameters passed to the controller?
IMHO this looks pretty ugly, and what if I have further more such page separations down the page tree
class News {
public function edit($id, $section){
if(method_exists($this, $section){
return $this->$section($id);
}
}
private function title($id){
// Display page to edit news title
}
private function body($id){
// Display page to edit news body
}
}
Not to mention that this can also cause potential problems with calling existing methods that are not supposed to be called.
Please don't execute methods dynamically based on get params. This can be very dangerous.
One simple way with standard routing:
// site.com/news/edit-title/12
public function editTitle($id);
// or depending on your framework
public function edit_title($id);
Another perhaps more cleaner solution would be to build your custom routes:
// site.com/news/edit/title/12
public function editTitle($id);
In a MVC pattern, what's the best way to handle when a single view could have multiple actions of the same type (e.g POST)?
Say for instance in a TODO list application. You might allow a user to create multiple lists. Each list could have multiple items. So a user navigates to site.com/list/1 which shows them all the items on the 1st list (1 is a GET parameter). There are then 2 forms (POST) on this page to allow a user to:
Create a new item
Delete an existing item
Should the bootstrap create a "listcontroller", inspect the POST variables and then call the appropriate method similar to :
$lc = new ListController();
if(strtolower($request->verb) === 'post'):
if(isset($_POST['title'])) :
$data = $lc->newItem($_POST);
$load->view('newitem.php', $data);
else if(isset($_POST['delete']) && isset($_POST['id'])):
$data = $lc->deleteItem($_POST);
$load-view('deleteitem.php', $data);
endif;// End if post title
else:
//GET request here so show view for single list
endif; //
Or is it better to just do something like
$lc = new ListController();
if(isset($_POST)):
//controller handles logic about what function to call
$data = $lc->PostAction($_POST);
// $data could also potentially hold correct view name based on post
$load->view();
else:
//again just show single list
endif;
I'm just struggling how best to have a controller potentially handle multiple different actions, as there's potentially quite a few nested if/else or case statements to handle different scenarios. I know these would have to sit somewhere, but where is cleanest?
I know that there are many frameworks out there, but I'm going through the whole "want to understand best practice" behind it phase. Or is this totally the wrong way to do it? Should the controllers actually be structured differently?
To begin with, I actually really like, how you are dealing with implementation of MVC. None of that rails-like parody, where view is managed inside the controller.
Here is what I think is the root of your problem: you are still using a "dumb view" approach.
View is not supposed to be a synonym for "template". Instead it should be a full object, which has knowledge-of and ability-to deal with multiple templates. Also, in most of MVC-inspired design patterns, the view instances are able to request information from model layer.
In your code the issue can be traced back to view's factory ( the $load->view() method ), which only gets what controller sends it. Instead controller should only change the name of the view, and maybe send something that would change the state of view.
The best solution for you would be to create full-blown view implementation. Such that view itself could request data from model layer and , based on data it received, decide which template(s) to use and whether to require additional information from model layer.
I think you're somewhat on the right track with the latter approach. However, you should not hard code the calling of actions in your bootstrap. The bootstrap should interpret the URL and call the action methods dynamically through the use of a function like call_user_func_array.
Also, I would suggest that you leave the rendering of views up to the action code so the action logic is self sufficient and flexible. That would allow the action to analyse the input for correctness and render errors or views appropriately. Also, you've got the method 'deleteItem' on your controller, but that should really be the work of a model. Perhaps you should read up some more on MVC and try to work with an existing framework to understand the concepts better before you try to implement your own framework (I would suggest the Yii framework for that).
Here's an example of how I think your logic should be implemented in a good MVC framework.
class ListController extends BaseController
{
public function CreateAction($title){
if(ctype_alnum($title))
{
$list = new List();
$list->Title = $title;
if($list->insert())
{
$this->render_view('list/create_successful');
}
else
{
$this->render_view('list/create_failed');
}
}
else
{
$this->render_view('list/invalid_title');
}
}
public function DeleteAction($id){
$list = List::model()->getById($id);
if($list == null)
{
$this->render_view('list/errors/list_not_found');
}
elseif($list->delete())
{
$this->render_view('list/delete_successful');
}
else
{
$this->render_view('list/delete_failed');
}
}
}
here is a great tutorial on how to write your own MVC framework
Kohana (and probably other frameworks) allow you get a route and echo its URL, creating routes that are easy to maintain.
Contact
Is this OK to have in the view, or should I assign it to a variable, and then pass the view the variable?
Thanks
You aren't performing logic here. This is perfectly acceptable.
Of course your view code would be a bit cleaner if you created a variable in your controller, but this really is fine IMHO.
I find such a concatenation unnecessary. It seems url::base() going to be used in every link on the site. Why not to have a method to add it automatically? Something like Route::url("contact")
And usage of such a construct in the template is OK.
You can create a function or static method for generating urls:
public static function url($routename, array $params = NULL)
{
return url::base().Route::get($routename)->uri($params);
}
I'm about to write a admin panel for my CMS written in CodeIgniter. There will be some user information visible at all time - both in the layout's header section and the sidebar. I'm used to do it in a way that I personally hope and think could be done a lot easier, since I'm tired of sending the same parametres to the view over and over again, when it's dynamic data that needs to be displayed on every page anyways (such as unread messages, username, name, status, etc).
I'll need controllers and models, I know that, but do I have to pass, just for an example, the user's username, unread messages etc. every time I need to load a view? Should I do some kind of library for this?
Now my question is: How would I do it when it comes to best practice and for making it easy to maintain in the future?
I hope my question is understandable :)
Personally, I would extend the Controller library (create a MY_Controller by following the guidance at the bottom of Creating Libraries at codeigniter.com).
You would use your model etc as normal. Then you would create a private function in your MY_Controller class to get the relevant "global" data and call
$this->load->vars('everywhere_data', $data_from_relevant_models);
which would make the data available to all views called from that point on as $everywhere_data. Then add a reference to that function in the constructor of MY_Controller, perhaps with a conditional checking for the user to be actually logged in.
If it's complex to collect and get all that data, you might write a library to handle it for you, but the 'controller' part would still be done by MY_Controller: i.e. to get the data and then use load->vars() to publish it to the view.
As a quick and untested example, MY_Controller would start something like as follows:
<?php
class MY_Controller extends Controller
{
private $logged_in_user;
function MY_Controller()
{
parent::Controller();
if( $this->_logged_in_userid() > 0 )
{
$this->logged_in_user = $this->_get_user( $this->logged_in_userid() );
$this->load->vars('logged_in_username', $this->logged_in_user->username );
} else {
$this->logged_in_user = false;
}
}
...
}
Note that things like _logged_in_userid() would access the session for you (e.g. return $this->session->userdata('logged_in_userid');), and _get_user() would access the relevant models.
Finally, you would have a view that accesses $logged_in_username (or everywhere_data in my first example) which you would call into your headers etc. This leaves your normal controllers uncluttered so that they can focus on delivering their specific functionality, stops you rewriting your code several times AND maintains the MVC ideals.
You could create a View just to hold the information and get it from a $_SESSION variable in the View itself if you want to keep it all in one place.