php - Sending data along with a redirect in CodeIgniter

Question

I have a simple C (of CRUD) function, and I'd like to send a message (error or success) along with my redirect from the "insert" function I have written up. Is there a way to adhere a POST field with a redirect?

In pseudo code I have:

function view_all{
    //set up some initial variables
    $this->load->view(viewing_page, $data)
}

function insert{
    if ($this->db->insert(my_table, $_POST)){
        $message = "All's well";
    }
    else {
        $message = "whoops!";
    }
    redirect(view_all);
}

So the viewing_page ideally would have something like

if (isset($message)){
    echo $message
}

So on the first time through, I don't see any message, and when/if there's an insert, it pops up the same page with the message. Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe redirect uses header(). If so, I don't believe you can send data along with a location header. You could accomplish the same thing using session vars or (not as good) appending a query string to the location URL.

For an 'accepted' way to do this in CodeIgniter look a little more than halfway down the session class documentation page.

CodeIgniter supports "flashdata", or session data that will only be available for the next server request, and are then automatically cleared. These can be very useful, and are typically used for informational or status messages (for example: "record 2 deleted").

This (now deleted - here's an archived version) post on flash messages covers both the query string and the session var method.

Update: To summarize the now deleted post, it showed both urlencoding a message and appending as a query string (example from post):

header('Location: http://www.example.com/index.php?message='.urlencode($message));

And setting a 'flash' variable using two frameworks (example from post):

//Zend Framework
$flashMessenger = $this->_helper->FlashMessenger;
$flashMessenger->setNamespace('actionErrors');
$flashMessenger->addMessage($message);

//CakePHP
$this->Session->setFlash('Your post has been saved.');
$this->redirect('/news/index');

Of course you can do roughly the same thing using $_SESSION directly (my example):

//first request
$_SESSION['flash'] = 'This is a simple flash message.';
//next request
$flash = $_SESSION['flash'];
unset($_SESSION['flash']); //flash is one time only