In this article I am going to talk a bit about a solution to a problem I encountered while developing an application with CodeIgniter. I was building a small photo management system which needed CRUD (create-read-update-delete) operations. And whenever the user was to perform such an operation, I wanted to let him/her know that the operation was completed (or an error had occurred).

A very common practice in ensuring a good user experience is returning the user back to the form after the submission was processed. This is the case especially for administration forms and not necessarily for survey-like forms for which a dedicated confirmation page also makes sense. In addition, the user expects the redirect to be accompanied by a status message confirming or disconfirming the success of his/her operation.

The problem

In CodeIgniter, when you process a form submission at the same path as the one showing the form, you can easily output the confirmation message. In the respective Controller method, before loading the form View, you can check for and process the POST data and depending on the result, pass along a confirmation message in a variable. As a result, the user experiences a page reload but with a status message regarding the operation s/he performed.

But what do you do in more complicated situations in which you have to submit the form to another path (be it a different method in the same Controller or another Controller altogether)? You are basically redirecting the user to a completely different page which most likely is not used for displaying any content. So you either need to load the form again there or redirect him/her back to the original form.

A “bad” way of doing this is loading the form in this method as well. This would mean repeating code and you end up having 2 urls for the same form. And what do you do if you have multiple forms you need processed by this same Controller method? Luckily, CodeIgniter comes equipped with all you need for the “good” way.

The solution

So if loading the form again is “bad”, redirecting back to the old form is the alternative. The CodeIgniter URL Helper comes to the rescue with the redirect() function that performs a header redirect to the path you specify as a parameter.

redirect('/login/form/', 'refresh');

Just make sure you load the URL Helper prior to expecting this to work.

So now the form is processed in another Controller and the user is redirected back. But how to pass along the confirmation message?

After some pondering, I found the solution for this problem in the CodeIgniter session class. There is this thing called flashdata which is basically session data that persists only for one server request, being cleared right after. Intrigued are you? I was too.

CodeIgniter supports this technique and it is perfect for our need. It is also very easy to use. First, make sure you have the session class loaded of course. Second, in the Controller that does the form processing, store the confirmation message as new flashdata:

$this->session->set_flashdata('data_name', 'data_value');

Third, in the Controller that displays the form (to which you redirect back), check to see if there is any flashdata and retrieve it like so:

$message = $this->session->flashdata('data_name');

You can then pass $message along to the View for being displayed above the form. And that’s it.

User submits the form, the form gets processed by another Controller method, the latter stores the message in the session flashdata and redirects the user to the original Controller method that loads the form. However, the latter Controller also checks if there is any flashdata set to display above the form. If there is, it will appear only that one request since flashdata won’t be present a second time.

By the by, if you need this flashdata to persist for one more server request, you can use the keep_flashdata() function.

Pretty cool. Thank you CodeIgniter. Hope this helps someone.