Question

I’m currently making an app in CodeIgniter and I was wondering on how I should deal with models. The way I have it set up at the moment:

Views: display
Controllers: display related things, form validation, redirects, talk to libraries, etc
Libraries: do the heavy lifting, talk to the models, generate error messages, logs, etc
Models: talk to the DB

(I’m currently using Active Record for most things)

Let me go straight to an example:

I have an Auth library and inside I have queries that area somewhat similar, varying only by the value in the WHERE clause.

Ex:

get_by_id($id);
get_by_password_hash($email);
get_by_email($email);

Should I have a bunch of these duplicate model functions or should I just have one simple function where I pass WHERE clauses and whatnot via the library?

Ex:

$where = array('id' => $id);
get($where);

Please let me know if you’d like me to clarify anything.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you have a lot of get_by_* methods for a given model, then it does make sense to use the magic method as TaylorOtwell suggested. Actually, the __call method, as well as __get and __set are used frequently in other frameworks to make it easy to do exactly what you’re talking about. Just remember CI will not play nice with the __call Magic method on the controller while mapping (but that won’t effect the model).

Basic way I look at CMV in CI:

• Libraries — this is where the bulk of the “rendering logic” happens but generally should be control/model/view agnostic. Almost entirely stateless (my preference).
• Helpers — utility functions, mostly view-related (everything else is really better off as a library (more orthogonal, yada, yada, yada))
• Controller — Loads libraries/models and calls methods
• Model — DB wrapping layer. Almost entirely stateful (my preference).
• Views — Display data

Frequently, the controller will do things like:

class Users
{
    function display( $id )
    {
        $this->load->library( 'myformatlib' );
        $this->load->model( 'mymodel' );
        $data = $this->mymodel->get_user( $id );
        $formatted = $this->myformatlib->addColors( $data );
        $this->mymodel->incrementViews( $id );
        $this->load->view( 'full_user', $formatted );
    }
}

As to passing where clauses — DB queries should almost be exclusively relegated to the model unless there is no other option or it would be excessively cumbersome to do so (but I would wonder if you couldn’t refactor that).