dragffy.com » CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter 1.7: The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.

Gabe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:24:17 +0000

I was getting the above error from CodeIgniter after urlencoding some base64 encoded binary data and passing it as a URI parameter to CodeIgniter. I looked in the config.php file and found that percent signs were allowed here:
$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'a-z 0-9~%.:_\-';

After some hunting around I found that CodeIgniter is not accepting this in the URI because the actual characters (that are encoded) fall outside the ASCII range. CodeIgniter is actually decoding the characters before testing them. The fix was quite simple, open up libraries/URI.php and go to line 189 where it says:
if ( ! preg_match("|^[".preg_quote($this->config->item('permitted_uri_chars'))."]+$|i", $str))
and change it to:
if ( ! preg_match("|^[".preg_quote($this->config->item('permitted_uri_chars'))."]+$|i", rawurlencode($str)))

Basically wrapping $str in the urlencode() function.

An alternative img() helper function for CodeIgniter

Gabe — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:59:47 +0000

It is my opinion that CodeIgniter’s default img() function that comes in the HTML Helper could have been easier to use. As it is if you want to give your image a name css class you have to define an array consisting of these attributes.

That takes up space and makes the code less readable for non-PHP programmers. Since I work closely with a web designer who is good with HTML but gets lost in PHP I want to leverage the pragmatic power of PHP to automate repetitive tasks (like typing out an entire HTML image tag), but at the same time the result needs to be obvious to a non-programmer but also shorter than the HTML equivalent. I feel the img() helper in CodeIgniter falls short of both these requirements.

CodeIgniter’s img() helper also takes a second parameter, a boolean, this decides whether the index.php file is included in the image path, good if you are using a media controller. For 99.9% of my sites I don’t need these. Therefore I wrote my own helper.

The file is called MY_html_helper.php and lives inside the folder system/application/helpers. As with other extensions to the CI core the prefix MY_ is determined in your config file, so change MY_ to whatever it should be. Add the following code to the file:

config->item('base_url');

	if ( ! $imgDir = $CI->config->item('image_dir')) $imgDir = 'assets/images/';

	$img = $imgPath.$imgDir.$imgName;

	$str = '";

	return $str;
}

All you have to make sure you do is load the html helper: $this->load->helper('html'); in your controller,
or put it in the array of helpers in system/application/config/autoload.php.

The helper assumes images live in the folder assets/images which lives alongside the system folder. If this is not where you put your images then you can specify an alternative directory in your config.php file. Simply add a line that looks like this to config.php: $config['image_dir'] = 'alternative/path/images/';. Don’t forget the trailing slash at the end. This alternative folder would live at the very top level of your application, alongside index.php.

Using the helper is easy and straightforward:

Will produce .

Any additional attributes you want in the html tag can be written as per usual as the second parameter. For example if you want to give the image an alt attribute and class:

Will produce:

The only hard part about this is making sure you get the single and double quotes correct in the second parameter.

Cheers

Making CodeIgniter’s Profiler AJAX compatible

Gabe — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:21:08 +0000

Modern web applications almost all make use of AJAX to enhance their user appeal. However, AJAX can be hard to debug, especially when all the traditional tools do little to help. When doing standard PHP coding CodeIgniter (CI) offers a profiler which will be appended to the bottom of generated pages. This gives you information on the request that was recently processed, including any POST or GET values passed to the script, how long execution took and how long any SQL queries took as well as what those queries actually were. During development I find this information indispensable to make sure my SQL queries are correct and things are working as I want.

However, when coding up AJAX aspects of the application this doesn’t work very well, any page fragments fed back to the JavaScript will have the profiler stuck at the bottom, and since these fragments are usually inserted inside DIVs the profiler cannot be read in it’s entirety, or it breaks the layout, or more likely, both of the above. Therefore I set out to find a way of making it AJAX compatible, so that it would always end up at the bottom of the page, even when it was originally returned appended to a page fragment. In the end this turned out easier than anticipated.

One small change needs to be made to your footer, you need to create an empty div with an ID of “debug”, this div will hold the profiler, so place the div where you want the profiler. The advantage with this is that you cannot see it when it is empty so it could even be left in for production code. The div looks like this:

Now we need to extend, or rather override the CI profiler so create the file system/application/libraries/MY_Profiler.php

Replace MY_ with the value of $config['subclass_prefix'] found in your config file, by default it is MY_.

Next paste the following code in to it. Remember to change the name of the class as dictated by the filename you use, also change the name of the constructor function too. You can also change the script line to load the jQuery library from one of your servers, or even rewrite the entire script section to use any JavaScript you like.



ENDJS;
            $output .= "";
            $output .= $this->_compile_uri_string();
            $output .= $this->_compile_controller_info();
            $output .= $this->_compile_memory_usage();
            $output .= $this->_compile_benchmarks();
            $output .= $this->_compile_get();
            $output .= $this->_compile_post();
            $output .= $this->_compile_queries();
            $output .= '';
            return $output;
    }
}

If you have already loaded a jQuery library in your header somewhere then make sure this ajax fragment doesn’t load jQuery again – otherwise all your event bindings and everything else will fail. If this is the case simply remove the line: