Codeigniter - How to create sidebar widgets/modules i.e. embedding the contents of another controller in a view

Question

Hi,

I have been tearing my hair out over this for about 3 hours, please can someone help?

Here is what I want to achieve...

On my home page I wish to have a sidebar widget/module which displays the latest 10 events from the events controller.

I started off trying to use the widget plugin, but could not get my head around it -[url=http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/109584/#552597]Plugin widget[/url]

Next I read about extending the standard controller to MY_Controller, so in the MY_Controller I added the code from my events controller which retrieves the latest events using the events model, I presume this is the correct place to put this?

contents of MY_Controller

[code] function home_events() {

       // load library
    $this->load->library(array('table','validation','template'));

    // load helper
    $this->load->helper('url', 'form');

    // load model
    $this->load->model('event_model','',TRUE);
    $this->load->model('location_model','',TRUE);

   $data['base'] = $this->config->item('base_url');
    // offset
    $uri_segment = 3;
    $offset = $this->uri->segment($uri_segment);

    // load data
    $events = $this->event_model->get_paged_list($this->limit, $offset)->result();

    // generate pagination
    $this->load->library('pagination');
    $config['base_url'] = site_url('event/index/');
     $config['total_rows'] = $this->event_model->count_all();
     $config['per_page'] = $this->limit;
    $config['uri_segment'] = $uri_segment;
    $this->pagination->initialize($config);
    $data['pagination'] = $this->pagination->create_links();


    // generate table data
    $this->load->library('table');
    $this->table->set_empty(" ");
    $this->table->set_heading('Name', 'Location', 'Date', 'Image', 'Actions');
    $i = 0 + $offset;
    foreach ($events as $event){
        $this->table->add_row($event->name, $event->location, $event->date, $event->image_url,
            anchor('event/view/'.$event->id,'view',array('class'=>'view'))
        );
    }
    $data['table'] = $this->table->generate();

 $data['home_events_view']    = $this->load->view('home_events', $tmp_data, TRUE);
 $this->load->view('home', $data); 
    }
//end function home_events
[/code]

Next in my home view I try and load the home_events_view with the following -

<?php echo $home_events_view; ?>

When I load the homepage I get the following error - Message: Undefined variable: home_events_view Filename: views/home.php

Have I approached this the correct way?, can anyone spot where I have gone wrong? Im guessing that I need to put something in my home controller to retrieve the events data?

Any help would be appreciated, I have learnt so much lately about codeigniter and I love it, but embedding views has been a big snag!

Thanks Dan

Answer 1

You can embed views within other views pretty easily, consider this:

In your Controller Pass the data for the relevent components of you page as a multidimensional array.

//Get data
$data['other_page_data'] = $this->some->model->get_page_data($page_id)
$data['home_events_view'] = $this->eventsmodel->get_events();

//Load View 
$this->load->view('home', $data); 

In your View Simply pass the events array back into $data and load the view.

<?php
$data['home_events_view'] = $home_events_view;

$this->load->view('home_events', $data);
?>