Question

New to CodeIgniter and new to Ocular so bear with me.

I used to code in the following way when running form validation (where the index() method contains the form loading code):

if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)
{
    $this->index();
}
else
{
    $this->load->view('view_name', $data);
}

However I’m now trying to use the Ocular Template Library and the above code no longer works see example below:

if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)
{
    $this->index();
}
else
{
    $this->template->set($data);
    $this->template->render();
}

The above code does not run through the index method as it used to without Ocular and I was wondering what the best practice is to correct this or even if my previous code was best practice?

Regards,
Numan1617

Answer 1

Sometimes it’s hard to determine best practice with Codeigniter because it’s convention-less nature, so all I can really tell you is how I’ve found best in my experience…

I assume you’re form view is being served up via index() and then you’re submitting your form to this (seperate) controller function that validates and processes the form data, and re-displays the view with errors if there was a problem…

I would clean this up by consolidating it all into a single function…

public function form()
{
    //if this is a post request
    if ($_POST)
    {
        //check the validation
        if ($this->form_validation->run())
        {
            //process it
            //and then redirect if you want to send to a "success" page
            redirect('uri/to/success');
        }
        else
        {
            //load up $data values to re-display form
        }
    }

    //load up any $data values needed for standard view
    $this->load->view('view', $data);
    // or $this->template stuff...

}

It always seemed to me to be a bad route to go down calling controller functions internally, ex. $this->index()