The lesson for today is… how to sort records sequentially on a numeric column and provide the ability to move records up and down in the existing sort order.
There are 2 functions I use for manual record sorting to change the display order in admin/user areas. The following example is based on a “pages” table and the commands are located in a model. For this example, the table has the following fields: page_id (int), page_sort (smallint), page_title (varchar), and page_content(text).
In a project I am currently working on, I needed a way to efficiently allow sorting of the records in an admin area while preserving the functionality of a search function (that passes the query in the url) and the pagination library. Initially it started off as a section of each method where sorting was allowed (record lists of things like countries, states, etc). My sorting routines finally ended up being put into their own helper.
I recently performed some code-fixing for a library extension I found over in CodeIgniter’s forum. The mod provided a convert() method for the Image_lib library. It lets you to convert (duh) the original image from/to JPG (default), GIF or PNG and optionally delete the original image.
When I first added this extension into my CI distribution, everything still worked without throwing errors so I started calling the new function. Then…
I am working on a CodeIgniter project that has information stored in the database with extended ascii characters (128-255) and UTF-8 encoding. As most of you know, CodeIgniter is fairly strict on what is allowed in a url (they only allow what SHOULD be permitted per RFC 1738 ;)). Furthermore sunce you can create basically any character by allowing a percent sign (%) in the URL, alowing that was not a viable option for me.
For instance you cannot use “ñ” (n with a tilde) in the URL parameters. Replacing it with “n” for the database query will however return a valid match. Problem solved! I can just use Normalizer or iconv, right?
I was tinkering around with a CodeIgniter project earlier today and at some point, I needed to use PHP’s file_exists() function. I tend to use $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] for my starting location for finding files located in the web-viewable areas (makes sense huh?). This makes it easy to get the file url by simply replacing the document_root from the path of the filename which results in a nice absolute path for linking. In this particular instance, I was checking for an image to show in place of a heading tag. Granted the code was simple and straight forward, but it could not get PHP to locate the file and I knew it was there.