I am a beginner with CodeIgniter still struggling to get a complete grasp on how to use the MVC ideology most cleanly.
I am writing a basic CMS system with the ability to vote on entries and follow people etc, consequently, I have found myself using the same or similar pieces of code across multiple views here and there consisting of various pieces of html and logic such as:
- Voting panel
- Follow/Unfollow panel
- Login/Logout panel
- Code to check if a user is logged in etc...
I am wondering where to put this code so it can be unified? I am thinking a helper is the way to go? If I declare the helper in the controller, it can be called from the corresponding view right?
Some of the elements are dynamic - such as a follow/unfollow button - It would need to check if you are already following the user or not and display the appropriate button, which would require a model to check. What I have now is that all the logic is in the controller and it returns an appropriate button, but it seems weird to be returning formed html code in a controller return as well. Should it be more like:
- controller checks if you are following someone
- the controller passes a boolean to the view
- the view calls the helper with this value to draw the appropriate button
Also, as a secondary question, I have been doing a fair bit of looping through mysql arrays in foreach loops to process mysql results returned from the view. It seems like my views are getting somewhat complicated, but I can't think of another way to do it, although perhaps this should be done in another helper as well?
Apologies if this is a naive or repetitive question, there is indeed a lot of discussion surrounding this subject but it is not always easily relatable to another project.