I have been a developer for nearly 20 years and a web developer for about 10 years. Over the years, I have considered creating a blog to share the things I have learned (and am learning) about web design and development, but I never seemed to have the time. When I began learning about web development using Ajax and Ajax Frameworks, I decided to take the time to create this blog.
My intention for this blog is to focus primarily on Ajax Frameworks, but since web development requires knowledge of many technologies, I will occasionally write about things such as CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Flash, etc.
Lately, I have been using JQuery as my primary Ajax tool. Although I have used other Ajax Frameworks in the past (Dojo Toolkit, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Scriptaculous/Prototype), JQuery has thus far been the easiest to learn. In my first few posts I will discuss some of the JQuery Plugins that I have created. Some of these include: a plugin for Google Maps (jquery.imGoogleMaps), Form validation and submission (jquery.imValidateForm), Page Populater (jquery.imPagePopulate), and a plugin to create lists (jquery.imList).
While I am still learning about some of the other Ajax Frameworks, I hope that what I have learned will be helpful to others. Just remember, “When you can pull the pebbles from my hand…”
One aspect of CodeIgniter that I don’t like is the amount of view files that I have to create. Although I create folders to group relevant views, I’m always searching through files to find the view that I need. To reduce the amount of files that I need for a project, I usually create a single view file to handle both inserts and updates to a table. But I had to create a CodeIgniter Helper function in order to make it work.
I often need to know the id of the last inserted record into a table. In the past, I’ve used a PHP function:
function getLastInserted($table, $id) { $query = "SELECT $id as maxID from $table where $id = LAST_INSERT_ID()"; $result = $this->runQuery($query); $row = mysql_fetch_row($result); return $row[0]; } |
To duplicate this using CodeIgniter’s Active Record, I could write:
function getLastInserted($table, $id) { $this->db->select_max($id); $Q = $this->db->get($table); $row = $Q->row_array(); return $row[$id]; } |
But, I learned that there is an even faster way that uses one of CodeIgniter’s Helper functions. Immediately after a record has been inserted into the database, I simply call:
$id = $this->db->insert_id(); |
Although, I am not sure how CodeIgniter knows which field is the primary key, it seems to work.
