Display alert message and redirect after click on accept

Question

I have a page with links to reports. Whenever somebody clicks on one report, they can download the excel file. However, sometimes there are no fields to make a report; in that case, I want to display an alert message and after they click on "accept", they get redirected to the main panel. When they click on the report, they go to a controller that uses a switch to get the data. If there's no data, the model returns FALSE; so at the end of the controller, I check:

if ($result_array != FALSE)
    to_excel($result_array->result_array(), $xls,$campos);
else {
    echo "<script>alert('There are no fields to generate a report');</script>";
    redirect('admin/ahm/panel');
}

If I get rid of redirect('admin/ahm/panel'); then the alert works, but it moves the user to the page that was supposed to generate the excel file. But if I use the redirect, the controller moves the user to the main panel without showing the alert.

Answer 1

echo "<script>
alert('There are no fields to generate a report');
window.location.href='admin/ahm/panel';
</script>";

and get rid of redirect line below.

You were mixing up two different worlds.

Answer 2

use this code to redirect the page

echo "<script>alert('There are no fields to generate a report');document.location='admin/ahm/panel'</script>";

Answer 3

Combining CodeIgniter and JavaScript:

//for using the base_url() function
$this->load->helper('url');

echo "<script type='javascript/text'>";
echo "alert('There are no fields to generate a report');"
echo "window.location.href = '" . base_url() . "admin/ahm/panel';"
echo "</script>";

Note: The redirect() function automatically includes the base_url path that is why it wasn't required there.

Answer 4

The redirect function cleans the output buffer and does a header('Location:...'); redirection and exits script execution. The part you are trying to echo will never be outputted.

You should either notify on the download page or notify on the page you redirect to about the missing data.