Routes in CodeIgniter are defined using the below formula: HERE,
Controller -is mapped to the controller name that should respond to the URL. Method – is mapped to the method in the controller that should respond to the URI request. Parameter – this section is optional.
In this CodeIgniter Routes tutorial, you will learn:
What are CodeIgniter Routes? CodeIgniter Routes Example Creating URL Routing for the Application CodeIgniter Views
CodeIgniter Routes Example
Let’s now look at a practical URL Routing in CodeIgniter example. Consider the following URL http://localhost:3000/contacts/edit/1 HERE,
The name of the controller responding to the above URL is “contacts” The method in the controller class Contacts is “edit” The edit method accepts a parameter. In the case of our example, the value “1” is passed to the method.
Here is a brief background of what we plan to do:
Routing – routing is responsible for responding to URL requests. CodeIgniter Routing matches the URL to the pre-defined routes. If not route match is found then CodeIgniter throws a page not found exception. Controllers – routes are linked to controllers. Controllers glue the models and views together. The request for data / business logic from the model and return the results via the views presentation. Once a URL has been matched to a Route in CodeIgniter, it is forwarded to a controller public function that interacts with the data source, business logic and returns the view that displays the results. Views – views are responsible for presentation. A view is usually a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is the part is responsible for displaying the web page to the user. Typically, the data displayed is usually retrieved from the database or any other available data sources.
To learn how to implement routers on a real-world project, we will assume that we are creating an application for managing contact details. The following table shows the URLs that will be working with. We will create the routes of our application based on the above table. We have defined the URLs, CodeIgniter route, and mapped them to the respective controller and method names.
Creating URL Routing for the Application
Let’s create CodeIgniter URL Routing for our tutorial project Open application/config/routes.php Modify the routes to match the following HERE,
$route[‘default_controller’] = ‘welcome’; defines the default controller Welcome. $route[‘contacts’] = ‘contacts’; defines a contacts route which calls the index method in the Contacts controller $route[‘create’] = ‘contacts/create’; defines a route create which points to the Contacts controller and calls the create method. $route[‘edit/:id’] = ‘contacts/edit’; defines a route edit which accepts a parameter of id and points to the edit method of Contacts controller $route[‘update/:id’] = ‘contacts/update’; defines a route update which accepts a parameter of id and points to the update method of the Contacts class. $route[‘delete/:id’] = ‘contacts/delete’; defines a route delete which accepts a parameter of id and points to the delete method of the Contacts controller.
The following table shows the respective URLs derived from the above defined routes Now that we have covered the routes let’s create the Contacts controller that will be responding to the actions specified in the routes. Create a new Route file in CodeIgniter as Contacts.php in application/controllers/Contacts.php Add the following code HERE,
Class contacts extends CI_Controller {..} defines our controller class and extends the CI_Controller class which comes with CodeIgniter. The methods defined above correspond to the routes we defined and those with parameters like delete accept a parameter of $id Notice the functions load three (3) views. The header and footer are common for all methods. The middle view is very specific to the action, i.e. delete for delete function create a view for creating a function, etc. Another important thing to remember is that the views are loaded from the contacts subdirectory.
CodeIgniter Views
We still need to take one more step before we can test our CodeIgniter Routes with Parameters in the web browser. Let’s create the corresponding views to the above controller methods. The following image shows what your application will look like
Create the following files in application/views
header.php – this file will contain contacts app menu and the header footer.php – this files will contain the application footer.
Create a new directory of contacts in views application/views/contacts Create the following files inside Your file structure should be as follows
Let’s now update the header.php HERE,
The above HTML code loads Burma CSS from a CDN network.
The following is the code for the footer.php Let’s now add the code for the index.php, edit.php and create.php files for contacts. You can save all the changes that have been made. Open the following URL in your web browser http://localhost:3000/contacts/ you can click on the New Contact and Edit Contact links and see what happens
Summary
Routes in CI are responsible for responding to URL requests. Routing matches the URL to the pre-defined routes. If no CodeIgniter Route match is found then, CodeIgniter throws a page not found an exception. CI Routing is responsible for responding to URL requests. Routing matches the URL to the pre-defined routes. Controllers glue the models and views together. The request for data / business logic from the model and return the results via the views presentation. Views are responsible for presentation. A view is usually a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this tutorial, we have learned how to create Routes in CodeIgniter for a real-world example application and covered the basics of routing that you need to know to get started developing CodeIgniter.
