how to create MVC for search in Codeigniter?

Question

I am very new to CodeIgniter, which has been very hard for me to learn so far. I mostly never work with frameworks and this is my first time.

I understand MVC but I really don't know how to create a search, even just a basic one: I just want someone to send a word in an input and search it in my database (with Ajax or not) and give the answer back. Could anyone help me with some ideas for how I should proceed? I understand that in the view I will put my divs, inputs and more, and in the controller I will call my functions that will interact with my model. I'm struggling with how to integrate them on CI though because the view is actually filled via the controller and I believe I can't use the functions of from it in the view.

Any help please?

Answer 1

Start by creating a controller that will be handling the search requests and displaying the search page, followed by the search-term passed to the model for database lookup (and sending it back to the controller). The controller will pass it to the view.

A little example;

The Controller

class Search extends CI_Controller {

    public function __construct()
    {
        parent::__construct();

        $this->load->helper('form');

        $this->load->model('search_model');
    }

    public function index()
    {
        $this->load->view('search_form');
    }

    public function execute_search()
    {
        // Retrieve the posted search term.
        $search_term = $this->input->post('search');

        // Use a model to retrieve the results.
        $data['results'] = $this->search_model->get_results($search_term);

        // Pass the results to the view.
        $this->load->view('search_results',$data);
    }

}

The Model

class Search_model extends CI_Model {

    public function get_results($search_term='default')
    {
        // Use the Active Record class for safer queries.
        $this->db->select('*');
        $this->db->from('members');
        $this->db->like('username',$search_term);

        // Execute the query.
        $query = $this->db->get();

        // Return the results.
        return $query->result_array();
    }

}

The view for displaying the search form

<?php
    echo form_open('search/execute_search');

    echo form_input(array('name'=>'search'));

    echo form_submit('search_submit','Submit');


?>

The View for displaying results

<div>
    <?php
        // List up all results.
        foreach ($results as $val)
        {
            echo $val['username'];
        }
    ?>
</div>