Question

I have a home controller with an index action that displays a set of featured products. However, the products are managed through a product controller including a proprietary model and views.

How do I access product information from within the index action in the home controller? Instancing product won’t work as the class isn’t loaded at runtime and CodeIgniter doesn’t provide a way to dynamically load controllers. Putting the product class into a library file doesn’t really work, either.

To be precise, I need the product views (filled with data processed by the product controller) inserted in the index view. I’m running CodeIgniter 2.0.2.

Answer 1

If you’re interested, there’s a well-established package out there that you can add to your Codeigniter project that will handle this:

https://bitbucket.org/wiredesignz/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc/

Modular Extensions makes the CodeIgniter PHP framework modular. Modules are groups of independent components, typically model, controller and view, arranged in an application modules sub-directory, that can be dropped into other CodeIgniter applications.

OK, so the big change is that now you’d be using a modular structure – but to me this is desirable. I have used CI for about 3 years now, and can’t imagine life without Modular Extensions.

Now, here’s the part that deals with directly calling controllers for rendering view partials:

// Using a Module as a view partial from within a view is as easy as writing:
<?php echo modules::run('module/controller/method', $param1, $params2); ?>

That’s all there is to it. I typically use this for loading little "widgets" like:

• Event calendars
• List of latest news articles
• Newsletter signup forms
• Polls

Typically I build a "widget" controller for each module and use it only for this purpose.