Well I’m sorry, it’s been so long for this part to come.. I had been working very hard on some clients and don’t have enough time to write. Here’s what I had been done if you’re curious :) : http://maps.GpsTrackingIndonesia.com, www.SunberryCorp.com, www.mypushme.com, www.kulacak.com, www.web2trace.com, www.pushmeportal.com, … The fun is almost all of them was written with CodeIgniter :).

Ok, let’s start with the easiest one first. We will create a simple menu page that contains links to other modules on the system. We put it on the Mainpage controller class.

Look at the Mainpage.php controller file. There is a function on it named exactly the same with the filename: Mainpage(). This should be exactly the same including the case. This is the constructor or initialization function of the class. Each time the class is called or instantiate, this function is called automatically. We put some initialization lines inside it:

The line parent::Controller() calls the constructor function of this class’s parent constructor which is the CodeIgniter’s Controller class so that it has all the properties and method of it’s parent.

Then, we load a helper library that contains helper functions related to URL handling such as site_url() to return the site’s URL that we are working on. Other functions on this helper are: anchor(), base_url(), uri_string(), etc. You can check it all on the user guide http://localhost/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html.

Again, look at the Mainpage.php file. We added a new function called index(). This function is analogous to the index.html file in static web page. It’s called by default when we point our browser to the Mainpage controller, ie: http://localhost/index.php/Mainpage.

On the function, we load view files. Here we divide the view into 3 pieces: header, main_menu, and footer. They are basically just regular PHP files dealing with display templates. This will make us easier to manage the look of our application later.

All of the view files should be located under system/application/views folder on CodeIgniter file structure. So we need to create all of them:

The header.php view file, contains the opening HTML tags, HEAD, TITLE and start of BODY. Later we can add CSS link definition here:

The footer.php view file, just a closing BODY and HTML tag, but you can later add your copyright notice, timestamps, etc:  

</body>
</html>

And the main_menu.php view file. Here we write a list of links to modules that we are going to develop later:

As we can see above, we call a helper function anchor(). This function will create a standard HTML anchor link based on your local site URL. So for example, if we call it achor(“Mainpage/trialBalance”, “Trial Balance”) then it will return this string:

<a href=”http://localhost/Mainpage/trialBalance”> Trial Balance </a>

assumed that you have configured your site URL as http://localhost/ on the config.php file.

Now we can run our application by pointing the browser to http://localhost and it should return something like the following:

Congratulation!

Next we will begin to code the COA module.

Passing parameter to a web page build with CodeIgniter (CI) can be done by using either POST variables which comes from HTML form or from the URI. But, different from traditional web application, by default CI only recognizes a segment based URI rather than query string format for passing parameter by URI.

In some circumstances we do need to use the query string to pass data to our page, which in this case using PHP global variable $_GET. By default, CI will not allow us to read the content of $_GET variable but instead using the URI class $this->uri->segment(the_segment_number).

To be able to read the content of $_GET variable within a controller we need to do several things.

First, edit the system/application/config/config.php file, locate the line of uri_protocol configuration, and change the value to PATH_INFO.

Then, in the controller that we need to read the $_GET variable, put this line inside the controller class constructor.

After that, the controller will be able to read the content of the $_GET variable. For example, if we call the controller by using this URI server.com/index.php/controller/abcd?q=1234&js=true, then we can read each of the parameter passed on the URI like this:

Here is an example of a controller class that can read both URI segment and query string.

On the above example, the controller called mapservices could be called by using this URI: server.com/index.php/mapservices/cities?q=bandung .

Secara default, database driver MySQL CodeIgniter konek ke port default MySQL yaitu 3306. Pada kondisi dimana port MySQL bukan 3306 misalnya 3307, CodeIgniter tidak punya option untuk menentukan pada port berapa MySQL berjalan.

Solusi untuk hal ini dapat dilakukan dengan beberapa cara:

1. mengedit file driver database CodeIgniter: system/database/drivers/mysqli/mysqli_driver.php. Pada file ini dapat ditentukan port MySQL pada function ‘db_connect’ yaitu dengan menambahkan parameter $port pada function tsb:
   mysqli_connect ( [string $host [, string $username [, string $passwd [, string $dbname [, int $port [, string $socket]]]]]] )
2. mengedit file PHP.INI, pada bagian  mysql.default_port, ganti dari 3306 menjadi 3307
3. jika tidak punya akses ke file PHP.INI, bisa juga dicoba dengan mengedit file config/database.php nya CodeIgniter yaitu pada baris:
   $db['default']['hostname'] = "mysqlhost.yourdomain.com:3307";