coming in another doorway

Yes, I am using Ci3. What is happening is I am using fusionAuth which is first making sure that the user is authenticated and then forwarding to the function in a controller. In the controller My function looks like this:
function MyFormEmployees()
{
$report = new MyFormUserE;
$report->run()->render();
}
This is using KoolReport. MyFormUserE is php file where I build some dataStores using sql. Koolreport does automatically create a handle to the database, but I don't know how to use it to just get two fields. That is why I was trying to go directly to the table with the CI database class. I tried using get_instance(), but that seems to cause an internal server error 500 in fusionAuth.

proof that an old dog can learn new tricks