Question

Say I have a select tag on my edit user form. It contains a list of schools a user can be assigned to.

<select 'school'>
    <option value='1'>School 1</option>
    <option value='2'>School 2</option>
</school>

created via: echo form_dropdown('school', $school_list)

If the user I’m editing already has a school assigned to him, I want the dropdown to default to that.

So, I did this:

$school = $this->db->get_where('schools', $filters) # result object from database
echo form_dropdown('school', $school_list, $school->id);

The problem is, of course, this throws an error when the user isn’t assigned a school yet, and $school->id is empty.

So my question is; What is the best way to solve a problem like this in codeigniter?

One way, I could think of to solve this, is by returning NULL on $school->id. So,

empty($school->id) && ($school->id = NULL);
echo form_dropdown('school', $school_list, $school->id);

But, it rather seems inelegant and, although, I haven’t tested it. I don’t think it will work well when I want to repopulate the form if, in case, it was submitted with errors.

echo form_dropdown('school', $school_list, set_value('school', $school->id));

Anyone have a better solution?

EDIT: Please note that this isn’t the actual code I use. I just typed this in right now, so if there are syntax errors or whatnot, my apologies.

Answer 1

Simply use echo form_dropdown('school', $school_list, set_value('school', @$school->id));

Then you know by the @ that value may be empty sometimes, and it supresses errors if that value is missing.

Doing this will send a NULL value to the 3rd parameter if you have no id, and it will instead select the first <option> by default.