Question

I have about 9 lines of code that will be the same in many of my controllers. They go in the index and are used to check whether the user is logged in, what level of access has been granted, and grab some session variables. What’s the best way to include snippets of code that are not complete functions within themselves?

The snippets are not in all controllers, just the ones that build the admin section of the application.

It would be great if I could use one line of code to include the snippet but I’m new to CodeIgniter and I don’t want to stray from best practices. If you could include a brief example that would help me visualize this. Thanks!

Answer 1

You want to create an extension of the base CI controller and do your checks there. Extending the cores are in the documentation here: http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user_guide/general/creating_libraries.html Scroll down to the Extending Native Libraries part.

In your new controller you can do something like this:

<?PHP
    class MY_Controller extends CI_Controller
    {

   function __construct()
   {
    parent::__construct();  //Gets all the CI_Controller functions and makes them available to this controller.
    if($this->session->userdata('is_logged_in')
    {
            $this->load->model('categories');
    $this->categories=$this->categories->getAllCategories();
    }

       }
     }

Then in your other controllers you use MY_Controller instead of CI_Controller like this:

<?php

class Pages extends MY_Controller {

Obviously you’ll have your own checks and variables to load but this should give you the general idea. In the example above I can now use $this->categories to retrieve my categories anywhere in the application that’s been loaded with MY_Controller.