Complete newbie, does this make sense?

[eluser]ghebert[/eluser]
I get the whole picture. Now there is some other stuff that I'm not sure where to put.

First, I have a Client table and a ProjectClient, which is a many-to-many. In the page where you edit the project, I want to have a checkbox for every client to indicate which one is part of the project. Should I put a new method in the Project model that would return the list of all the clients, and another method that would return all the clients for the current project?

Second, on the "index" page, where all the project are listed. I would like to put a search box and it would filter the results, I guess I can do that part alone. But I would also like to put a dropdown box where there would be all the clients listed in at least one of the projects. Selecting a client would narrow the results down to the projects where this client is in. Should I add a method in the model that would return all the clients from all the projects, and then add this to the data I'm passing to the view?

Lastly, when CI does the SQL query to insert or update a row, hoes does it know if each of the fields is an integer, a string, etc.?

Thanks!