Question

Let’s say I have a method at Controller named

book($chapter,$page);

where $chapter and $page must be integer. To access the method, the URI will look like

book/chapter/page

For example,

book/1/1

If user try to access the URI without passing all parameter, or wrong parameter, like

book/1/

or
book/abcxyz/1

I can do some if else statements to handle, like

if(!empty($page)){
   //process
}else{
   //redirect
}

My question is, is there any best practice to handle those invalid parameters passed by user? My ultimate goal is to redirect to the main page whenever there is an invalid parameter? How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Using the CodeIgniter routing in config/routes.php is pretty useful here, something like this:

$route['book/(:num)/(:num)'] = "book/$1/$2";
$route['book/(:any)'] = "error";
$route['book'] = "error";

Should catch everything. You can have pretty much any regular expressions in the routes, so can validate that the parameters are numeric, start with a lowercase letter, etc..