CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpcodeigniter
Martin
Martin

Reputation: 21

Codeigniter - creating views Q

I am not too technical but wanted to know since my tech team is implementing this way: Do we need to create a 'controller' file for each set of views that we need to call on the website OR can we control ALL the views from 1 controller? It seems like more work to have multiple controllers control all the views. I would like to have 1 controller call all the views to cut down on project time but not sure if this is possible or even a good practice?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 166

Answers (5)

am05mhz
am05mhz

Reputation: 2875

codeigniter itself does not restrict you on how many controllers you use.

but as a basic idea, i tend to seperate controllers into modules.

for example, if your site have a front end and a back end, i would separate them, so i got 2 controllers (each with their own views).

this way, if you have more than 1 person working on the site, you can assign 1 person with the front end, and the other with the back end.

further more, you can break them apart into smaller modules. for example, in the front end, there is a home page and an article page (certainly you have different views for those), you can also break them down if you feel they are complex enough. but if you think they are simple, then it is fine if you use 1 controller for those views.

Upvotes: 0

Kumar
Kumar

Reputation: 5147

I will have a single controller using multiple views. Here is how. My webpages have common header, footer and navigational structure, so these views will be common to all the web page calls hence a controller may inherit a method that takes content and assembles a page using header/footer/common views. For displaying grids I may have a common grid view that I can keep using in multiple controllers for displaying tabular data. Different use cases can reuse some views. So it makes sense that you can use multiple views within one controller.

Upvotes: 1

hohner
hohner

Reputation: 11588

It really depends on what your controller is supposed to do. If all you want to do is show blog posts or content pages, for example, you can just use one controller called 'blog' or 'pages'. Controllers handle the logic. If you have many features you'd like to run (such as accounts, events, photos, etc.) it's usually always wise to give each their own controller so they can handle operations suitably with their model.

If you use frameworks like CodeIgniter, you can use their routes feature to automatically route certain URLs through a particular controller. For example, if you wanted pages to have a URL of http://example.com/page/page-title - you'd need to use this line in your routes config file:

$route['page/(:any)'] = 'page/get_page';

Any URI request that contains 'page' will be handled by the 'page' controller and the 'get_page' method. You can they grab the page-title or page-id by using $this->uri->segment(2).

Upvotes: 1

Damien Pirsy
Damien Pirsy

Reputation: 25445

Yes, it's possibile; you can easily test it yourself:

class Customcontroller extends CI_Controller {

    function index()
    {
      $data['test'] = 'test';
      $this->load->view('header', $data);
      $this->load->view('body');
      $this->load->view('footer');
    }    
}

You'll notice that doing this way $data will be available to all views, even if not passed individually while loaded.

I find it a nice way to building pages, using views as blocks. So, you can also present views according to some constraints:

  $this->load->view('header');
 if($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)
 {
    $this->load->view('display_form');
 }
  else
 {
   $this->load->view('form_sent');
 }
 $this->load->view('footer');

for example.

Although MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, and suggest a one-to-one correlation, using different views for a same controller I doubt it can be considered "bad practice"; as already being said, there's no really an ideal way of doing this, what's important is keeping the logic separated and making your code well-structured and organized, especially when working in a team.

Upvotes: 1

laurent
laurent

Reputation: 90853

This is neither good nor bad practice. All that matters is that your code is clear and well structured. After that, Code Igniter gives you lots of flexibility on how you use controllers and views. Personally, I tend to use one view per action (so a controller often controls several views).

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions