Create News Items

You now know how you can read data from a database using CodeIgniter, but you haven’t written any information to the database yet. In this section, you’ll expand your news controller and model created earlier to include this functionality.

Enable CSRF Filter

Before creating a form, let’s enable the CSRF protection.

Open the app/Config/Filters.php file and update the $methods property like the following:

<?php

namespace Config;

use CodeIgniter\Config\BaseConfig;

class Filters extends BaseConfig
{
    public $methods = [
        'post' => ['csrf'],
    ];

    // ...
}

It configures the CSRF filter to be enabled for all POST requests. You can read more about the CSRF protection in Security library.

Warning

In general, if you use $methods filters, you should disable auto-routing because auto-routing permits any HTTP method to access a controller. Accessing the controller with a method you don’t expect could bypass the filter.

Create a Form

To input data into the database, you need to create a form where you can input the information to be stored. This means you’ll be needing a form with two fields, one for the title and one for the text. You’ll derive the slug from our title in the model. Create a new view at app/Views/news/create.php:

<h2><?= esc($title) ?></h2>

<?= session()->getFlashdata('error') ?>
<?= service('validation')->listErrors() ?>

<form action="/news/create" method="post">
    <?= csrf_field() ?>

    <label for="title">Title</label>
    <input type="input" name="title" /><br />

    <label for="body">Text</label>
    <textarea name="body" cols="45" rows="4"></textarea><br />

    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Create news item" />
</form>

There are probably only three things here that look unfamiliar.

The session()->getFlashdata('error') function is used to report errors related to CSRF protection.

The service('validation')->listErrors() function is used to report errors related to form validation.

The csrf_field() function creates a hidden input with a CSRF token that helps protect against some common attacks.

Go back to your News controller. You’re going to do two things here, check whether the form was submitted and whether the submitted data passed the validation rules. You’ll use the validation method in Controller to do this.

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

class News extends BaseController
{
    public function create()
    {
        $model = model(NewsModel::class);

        if ($this->request->getMethod() === 'post' && $this->validate([
            'title' => 'required|min_length[3]|max_length[255]',
            'body' => 'required',
        ])) {
            $model->save([
                'title' => $this->request->getPost('title'),
                'slug'  => url_title($this->request->getPost('title'), '-', true),
                'body'  => $this->request->getPost('body'),
            ]);

            return view('news/success');
        }

        return view('templates/header', ['title' => 'Create a news item'])
            . view('news/create')
            . view('templates/footer');
    }
}

The code above adds a lot of functionality. First we load the NewsModel. After that, we check if we deal with the POST request and then the Controller-provided helper function is used to validate the user input data. In this case, the POST data, and the title and text fields are required.

CodeIgniter has a powerful validation library as demonstrated above. You can read more about this library here.

Continuing down, you can see a condition that checks whether the form validation ran successfully. If it did not, the form is displayed; if it was submitted and passed all the rules, the model is called. This takes care of passing the news item into the model. This contains a new function url_title(). This function - provided by the URL helper - strips down the string you pass it, replacing all spaces by dashes (-) and makes sure everything is in lowercase characters. This leaves you with a nice slug, perfect for creating URIs.

After this, a view is loaded to display a success message. Create a view at app/Views/news/success.php and write a success message.

This could be as simple as:

News item created successfully.

Model Updating

The only thing that remains is ensuring that your model is set up to allow data to be saved properly. The save() method that was used will determine whether the information should be inserted or if the row already exists and should be updated, based on the presence of a primary key. In this case, there is no id field passed to it, so it will insert a new row into it’s table, news.

However, by default the insert and update methods in the Model will not actually save any data because it doesn’t know what fields are safe to be updated. Edit the NewsModel to provide it a list of updatable fields in the $allowedFields property.

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use CodeIgniter\Model;

class NewsModel extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'news';

    protected $allowedFields = ['title', 'slug', 'body'];
}

This new property now contains the fields that we allow to be saved to the database. Notice that we leave out the id? That’s because you will almost never need to do that, since it is an auto-incrementing field in the database. This helps protect against Mass Assignment Vulnerabilities. If your model is handling your timestamps, you would also leave those out.

Routing

Before you can start adding news items into your CodeIgniter application you have to add an extra rule to app/Config/Routes.php file. Make sure your file contains the following. This makes sure CodeIgniter sees create() as a method instead of a news item’s slug. You can read more about different routing types here.

<?php

// ...

$routes->match(['get', 'post'], 'news/create', 'News::create');
$routes->get('news/(:segment)', 'News::view/$1');
$routes->get('news', 'News::index');
$routes->get('pages', 'Pages::index');
$routes->get('(:any)', 'Pages::view/$1');

// ...

Now point your browser to your local development environment where you installed CodeIgniter and add /news/create to the URL. Add some news and check out the different pages you made.

Congratulations

You just completed your first CodeIgniter4 application!

The image underneath shows your project’s app folder, with all of the files that you created in red. The two modified configuration files (Config/Routes.php & Config/Filters.php) are not shown.