Question

I’m trying to introduce CI into a legacy application but want to use some of the globals that already exist externally from CI. I have been loading them into /CI/config/config.php and acquiring them using this in the view:

$this->config->item(‘myvar’);

That works fine. However, if I include my sidebar in the model called sidebar.php, which wants to access the globals stored in globals.php they come up as undefined. Note that sidebar.php uses a include statement to access globals from globals.php. Also, the globals are defined like this in globals.php:
$myvar = “bla”;

globals.php and sidebar.php are outside of CI. These two files don’t need to execute functions.

Does anyone know of a trick to allow CI and files it includes to access globals outside of it? I don’t want to change the legacy code too much.

Answer 1

It turns out I found an include_once statement for the globals.php file in a place where the legacy code couldn’t access it. The legacy code already had an include_once statement but it was ignored b/c it was already included elsewhere.

I assume that it’s acting similar to this in CI if I open testfile.php:

testfile.php:

include_once("globals.php");

function testf(){
  include("sidebar.php");
}

testf();

sidebar.php

include_once("globals.php");

echo $myvar; //fails