Question

I’m developing an app in CodeIgniter and MySQL. The app include user profiles; am using Tank Auth to register and authenticate users.

I’ve setup a couple of users and now want to view each user’s profile. I need to know:

1 – How to add custom session data into Tank Auth. I have an idea of how the code should look (http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/sessions.html), but am not sure where the code should go in the auth controller, which is rather extensive – https://github.com/ilkon/Tank-Auth/blob/master/application/controllers/auth.php.

2 – How to pass user data through to a view. I’ve setup a function to retrieve user data (see below) and want to pass it through to my profile view–I’m thinking that userdata (in the code) will represent the custom session data, which will include the user’s id and username, one of which I’ll need for the URL.

3 – URLs I want the URLs to look like this: http://example.com/users/3394 or http://example.com/users/fooy_foo. I know I need to do something with CI URI routing, but am not certain how to tie it in with the results I get from the query.

Here’s the code from the User controller {

function index()
    {    
    $id = $this->tank_auth->is_logged_in('id');

    $this->db->where('id', $id);
    $q = $this->db->get('user');
    $data['userdata']=$q;

    $this->load->view('user_view', $data);
    }
}

Answer 1

1. I’m not familiar with Tank Auth, but I’d advice you to check out the official page for Tank Auth. Maybe you’ll get a better understanding from reading about the library. Here’s a tutorial that shows how to set up Tank Auth with CodeIgniter.

2. By looking at your code, from the user controller, I see that you’re passing data the correct way. You’re passing it into the view as an array. In your view the array element will be available as a variable. So to use the data in the view you simply use the variable $userdata. If you’d like to add more data to include in the view, you simply add another element to the $data array!

3. If you create a controller named users you will be able to reach it at www.example.com/users. You can then edit your index function to include a parameter $uid which will generate your desired url: www.example.com/users/3394.

Example on #3:

Lets say you have created the users controller. This would then be your index() function:

function index($userid) {
  // You should probably have a model here that retrieves information
  // about the user based on the userid
  $data['user'] = $this->User_model->getUserInformation($userid);
  $this->load->view('users', $data);
}

That’s one way you could set up your index function. The $userid variable is defined by the url http://www.example.com/users/1234. That’s the way urls work in codeigniter. You can read more about it here.