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Hey guys I've been working on this for a few days now but I can't seem to get it to work :(

Here is the situation.

I have an "edit profile" page. On that page you can, like the name implies, edit profile information.

for the example here is what I'm trying to do.

Database record:

||-------||----------||-----------||
|| name  ||  surname ||   email   ||
||-------||----------||-----------||
||  Amy  ||   Nuts   || [email protected] ||
||-------||----------||-----------||

I have a form that gives the user the ability to enter their own data and change some of the fields.

The form fields all have names that corrospond with the database fields.

<input name="name" ......
<input name="surname" ......
<input name="email" .....

This is all very logical and easy.

The problem that I have is when I submit the form. I build my website with HTML5 and use placeholders for the form fields. I do this because it looks nice imo and I can experiment some with it. When I just want to update the surname, the other fields stay empty. Codeigniter by default returns a "false" in the case of an empty post item.

Maybe you can see my problem.

When I send the post data to the model and it updates the database record, it will remove the data from the "name" and "email" fields and update the surname.

The array looks like this:

array(
    "name"    =>
    "surname" => NEW
    "email"   =>
)

After running this through the update function of codeigniter the database record looks like this

||-------||----------||-----------||
|| name  ||  surname ||   email   ||
||-------||----------||-----------||
||       ||   NEW    ||           ||
||-------||----------||-----------||

what I want to know is, if there is a posibility to let codeigniter ignore the array items that do not have data.

I hope you guys can help out. I'm at a loss here.

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1 Answer 1

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use array_filter($data) to remove any empty fields before sending it to database.

also it looks like you dont validate your data for update ?

can you please show the code in your model to store updates ?

example

$data['name']=$this->input->post('name');
$data['lastname']=$this->input->post('lastname');

$data=array_filter($data); //will remove empty keys

Or

if($this->input->post('name')) $data['name']=$this->input->post('name');
if($this->input->post('lastname')) $data['name']=$this->input->post('lastname');

in all cases you should really always validate your data before submitting it to database;

just a general note:

i would recommend you always have 2 layers of validations;

  1. at controller to validate form (using CI form_validation)
  2. at model to validate DATA (also using CI form_validation)

never trust your controller alone. the best DRY method i use in CI is that in my model i use variable

models/demo_model.php

public $validate =array(
['field' => 'login','label' => 'lang:user_login','rules' => 'trim|required|min_length[5]|max_length[100]|xss_clean'],
['field' => 'password','label' => 'lang:user_password','rules' => 'trim|required|min_length[5]|max_length[35]|xss_clean']);

function is_valid($data,$mode=null){

if(!$this->validate || empty($data) )return false; //nothing to validate !

$config=array();

//if updating then its normal that some variables will be missing
//so lets apply rules for only data we going to update; to make sure its xss_clean, not exceed database size, trim, etc;;
if($mode = 'update'){ 
    foreach($this->validate as $rule)if( ! empty( $data[ $rule['field'] ] )$config[]=$rule
}else{
    $config = $this->validate
}

$this->form_validation->reset_validation();
$this->form_validation->set_data($data); #we are not using $_post;
$this->form_validation->set_rules($config);

return ($this->form_validation->run() === TRUE)

}

now in every database call before you use $this->db->insert; or update; u just use

$this->is_valid($data,'update'); // dont set 2nd param if you are inserting and want all rules to apply;

and this will validate all your requests;

also note that codeigniter form_validation can be used for modifing submitted values also; for example using trim rule, or md5 rule on password field

well sorry i might hv extended my answer too long, i hope i answered you question.

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4 Comments

I use the form validation that is build in to codeigniter :) Also my XSS filtering is always on in my codeigniter config. I could'nt agree more that you should always validate the data before sending it to the database. I had some problems with that in the past when I didn't know how to ;) I learned from that :P But thank you for the reply. I will try it asap!
updated answers with a bit of code i use in my base core model to auto validate all my queries to database;
Great edit. I will put this page in my favorites :) thx again
@Zalaboza : I just gone through your answer, I'm facing same issue, I'm using stored procedure to update database records. And for updating fields I'm passing array of the fields. While using your code update query is not executing.

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