Professional CodeIgniter

Chapter 4: Creating the Main Web Site

101

Leaving out the colors and sizes is intentional at this point. There wasn ’ t much discussion about these

database fields during discovery, and you suspect that Claudia will fill you in once she reviews your

work so far. That ’ s OK, because in Agile the idea is to iterate.

Displaying Search Results

Writing a search engine in CodeIgniter, and especially for this project, is pretty straightforward. As you ’ ll

see, it ’ s all about judiciously using the built - in wildcard - matching methods in your model to pull it off.

Without further ado, here ’ s a search() function you can add to the MProducts model. You pass it a

single argument, a search term, which is then used to match across the name, shortdesc, and longdesc

fields of the products table. For now, this search function returns a maximum of 50 rows in the result set:

function search($term){

$data = array();

$this- > db- > select(‘id,name,shortdesc,thumbnail’);

$this- > db- > like(‘name’,$term);

$this- > db- > orlike(‘shortdesc’,$term);

$this- > db- > orlike(‘longdesc’,$term);

$this- > db- > orderby(‘name’,’asc’);

Figure 4 - 11