Chapter 6: Creating a Dashboard
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If no POST data are detected, show the form, but along the way, gather up all subcategories eligible for
product assignment with an MCats model function named getCategoriesDropDown(). You ’ ll build
this function and the other function you need in a minute. First, here ’ s the create() function for your
controller.
function create(){
if ($this- > input- > post(‘name’)){
$this- > MProducts- > addProduct();
$this- > session- > set_flashdata(‘message’,’Product created’);
redirect(‘admin/products/index’,’refresh’);
}else{
$data[‘title’] = “Create Product”;
$data[‘main’] = ‘admin_product_create’;
$data[‘categories’] = $this- > MCats- > getCategoriesDropDown();
$this- > load- > vars($data);
$this- > load- > view(‘dashboard’);
}
}The addProduct() function in the MProducts model is a little more complicated than the
addCategory() function you created in the last section, and for one good reason: You have to upload an
image and a thumbnail.
The first part of the function is extremely straightforward, as you are expecting a series of POST fields
from a form, fields like: name, shortdesc, and so on. These are extremely easy to gather and populate a
data array with:
function addProduct(){
$data = array(
‘name’ = > $_POST[‘name’],
‘shortdesc’ = > $_POST[‘shortdesc’],
‘longdesc’ = > $_POST[‘longdesc’],
‘status’ = > $_POST[‘status’],
‘grouping’ = > $_POST[‘grouping’],
‘category_id’ = > $_POST[‘category_id’],
‘featured’ = > $_POST[‘featured’],
‘price’ = > $_POST[‘price’]);Next, to enable file uploads, you need to do a bit of configuration work. Using a $config array, set
values for upload_path (where you expect images to be stored), allowed_types (to restrict the types of
files that can be uploaded), max_size, and so on, and then load the upload library.Please note that you must set the upload_path folder to be writable for any of this to work! Checking on
that and making sure it is writable will save you a lot of time.