DevShed has posted the next article in their "Introduction to CodeIgniter" series today. This new tutorial, the sixth in the series, looks at reworking their example to use a model instead of a direct connection to the database.

You'll recall that I developed a sample PHP application. It displayed the contents of some database rows which were previously fetched from a "users" MySQL table. Moreover, these rows were retrieved by using the active record class bundled with CI. However, it's also possible to define a model that performs all of the database-related operations, instead of directly using the database class.

They create a simple User_model class that loads in the database functionality and, using that object, makes a select (get) to retrieve all user information in one method and select information in another. CodeIgniter "automagically" knows to pull from the Users table based on the naming convention of the file and class.