Question

I have a form that after so many seconds automatically saves the form to a database (well that is my intention)

The script below grabs the values in an jQuery AJAX request and sends this to a controller – but whenever I try to var_dump the values it doesnt seem to work from the serialised array. I can see the parameters are there when I view FireBug in Firefox but cannot seem to print the array – can anyone explain why?

// view logic
var t = setTimeout("autosave()", 10000); 
$.ajax( 
{ 
    type: "GET", 
    url: "/questionnaires/autosave", 
    data: $("form").serialize(), 
    cache: false, 
    success: function(msg) {
        return false;
    }
});

// controller logic
function autosave()
{
    $str = parse_str( $this->input->get_post('form') );
    var_dump($str); // intend to do an insert query here to the db
}

Answer 1

You most likely dont have query_string enabled in your config.php.

As a result you wont be able to use GET reliably. Your best option is to change type: "GET", to type: "POST",.

Then use $this->input->post() to access post variables. You can reference this information from the Codeigniter Documentation:

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/input.html

$this->input->post()

The first parameter will contain the name of the POST item you are
looking for:

$this->input->post('some_data'); The function returns FALSE (boolean)

if the item you are attempting to retrieve does not exist.

The second optional parameter lets you run the data through the XSS
filter. It’s enabled by setting the second parameter to boolean TRUE;

$this->input->post('some_data', TRUE); To return an array of all POST

items call without any parameters.

To return all POST items and pass them through the XSS filter set the
first parameter NULL while setting the second parameter to boolean;

The function returns FALSE (boolean) if there are no items in the
POST.

$this->input->post(NULL, TRUE); // returns all POST items with XSS
$this->input->post(); // returns all POST items without XSS