Question

I am learning Codeigniter 2 and successfully playing around with their Tutorial/Example about how to create a basic news application.

So after getting this working, I wanted to try to add a “delete record” link to the news item to see if I could figure this out on my own.

I added this to my models file, news_model.php:

public function delete_news($id) {
    $this->db->delete('news', array('id' => $id));
}

I added this to my controllers file, news.php:

public function delete($id) {
    $this->news_model->delete_news($id);

    $data['news'] = $this->news_model->get_news();
    $data['title'] = 'News item deleted';

    $this->load->view('templates/header', $data);
    $this->load->view('news/index', $data);
    $this->load->view('templates/footer');
}

I added this to my views file, index.php:

<a href="/news/delete/<?php echo $news_item['id'] ?>">Delete Item</a>

And finally, I added this to my config file, routes.php

$route['news/delete/(:any)'] = 'news/delete/$1';

It appears to be working as written.

From the News listing page at /news/, I click on the link for the news item and when the page reloads, the corresponding item is gone.

Questions:

1) After the page reloads, the URL is showing /news/delete/id, where /id is the item number. But, I don’t want this new URL, I really just want the /news/ page to reload to show the new content. Obviously, the way I did this is potentially dangerous, because a simple page refresh by the user would delete another item. What is the standard way to fix/handle this?

2) In my Controller delete() function, after the first line, I am basically just repeating the same 5 lines of code from the Controller index() function. No doubt this is somehow related to question #1, but again, what is the better way to do this?

3) Anything else I missed relating to “standard” or “best practice”?

Answer 1

Thank-you to Jean-François G. B. and Stephan S. for pointing me in the right direction.

This is the working solution…

controllers file, news.php:

public function delete($id) {
    $this->news_model->delete_news($id);
    $this->load->helper('url');
    redirect('/news/');
}

---

EDIT:

Modified to display a confirmation message, “record #x deleted”…

public function delete($id) {
    $this->news_model->delete_news($id);
    $this->load->helper('url');
    $this->load->library('session');
    $this->session->set_flashdata('error_message', 'record #'. $id . ' deleted');
    redirect('/news/');
}

and inside views file, index.php:

<div id="message">
    <?php 
        if ( $this->session->flashdata('error_message') ) {                 
            echo $this->session->flashdata('error_message');
        }
    ?>
</div>