Creating CRUD admin panel in Codeigniter

Earlier I’ve shown how to create a CRUD admin panel using plain php. In this article I will explain how you can do it using Codeigniter.
Steps, will be pretty much the same, even easier because I already wrote files that will automate most parts for Codeigniter.
Let’s say we need to create an admin panel for an eCommerce website, we have a products and categories db tables and we need to create a CRUD admin panel for products.

So, let’s start!

- First, download and install Codeigniter( I will be using Codeigniter 2.1.0 in this tutorial ). Make sure that you set your database connection settings in /application/config/database.php and included ‘database’ to list of libraries that will be autoloaded in /application/config/autoload.php , we will also need ‘url’ helper, so please add it to autoload as well.
- Download Data manager library, extract contents of archive in your root folder and rename extracted folder to say ‘data_manager’.
- Replace /data_manager/params.php with one from this archive. It will make Data manager retrieve database connection settings and daseurl from Codeigniter config files.
- Next step is creating Data manager profile file which will tell Data manager what exactly we need to do. For our ‘products’ db table, let’s create a /data_manager/profiles/products_admin.php profile file with following contents:

<?php
$table = 'products';

$fields = array (
	array (
		'name' => 'id'
		, 'type' => 'key'
		, 'title' => 'ID'
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'productCode'
		, 'type' => 'input'
		, 'title' => 'Code'
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'productName'
		, 'type' => 'input'
		, 'title' => 'Name'
		, 'is_link' => 1
		, 'link' => '/products/edit/*'
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'category_id'
		, 'type' => 'lookup'
		, 'title' => 'Category'
		//lookup field specific parameters
		, 'lookup_table' => 'categories'
		, 'key_field' => 'id'
		, 'values_field' => 'title'
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'productScale'
		, 'type' => 'list'
		, 'title' => 'Scale'
		, 'items' => array(
			"1:10" => "1:10( minimal )"
			, "1:12" => "1:12( tiny )"
			, "1:18" => "1:18( average )"
			, "1:24" => "1:24( big )"
			, "1:32" => "1:32( maximal )"
		)
		, 'list_mode' => 0
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'productDescription'
		, 'type' => 'textarea'
		, 'title' => 'Description'
		, 'rows' => 5
		, 'cols' => 60
		, 'list_mode' => 0
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'buyPrice'
		, 'type' => 'input'
		, 'title' => 'Price'
		, 'css_class' => 'product_price'
	)

	, array (
		'name' => 'is_active'
		, 'type' => 'check'
		, 'title' => 'Is active'
	)
	, array (
		'name' => 'managing'
		, 'type' => 'managing'
		, 'title' => 'Actions'
		, 'delete_link' => '/products/delete/*'
		, 'edit_link' => '/products/edit/*'
		, 'non_db' => 1
		, 'single_mode' => 0
	)
);

Variable $table is telling Data manager that we will be working with ‘products’ db table.
Variable $fields is array of fields that will be used for our admin panel. What each field does you can see from result, parameters are mostly self-explanatory, but you can also look at detailed explanation of Data manager fields parameters.

- Next step is to create controller and views. Download archive with sample controller and views and extract it to /application folder.
- Rename controller file and folder inside views folder from ‘sample_controller’ to a name of controller that you want to use. In out case let’s use controller name ‘products’.
After that open controller file ( /application/controllers/products.php ), rename controller class name to ‘Products’ and change value for class variable $dm_profile to our Data manager profile name ( ‘products_admin’ ) to make it look like this:

<?php
include_once BASEPATH.'../data_manager/DataManager.php';

class Products extends CI_Controller {
	private $dm_profile = 'products_admin';
	private $controller = '';
...

And that’s it!!!

You asking “Soooo easy?” – Yes, so easy!

So if you access http://your_domain/products you will see something like this:

And if you click ‘Edit’ link in front of any item, or item title you will see this:

Here you can download complete sources of this demo project with a database.
You can change controllers and views files to make this admin panel look and work more like you want it to look, it is just a demo that shows basic usage of Data manager library.
So keep in touch with new tutorials and new versions of Data manager.