Help in include files

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
The best way to do this and stick to the MVC principle is to use a base controller. Most of the time in application development, you don't need more than one controller. What you are typically doing is loading and nesting views into one main view. The Controller (singular) contains all the functions required by the app.

This breaks down a bit when you start organizing your app into multiple controllers, because you then must concoct a way to continue nesting these globally-important views without repeating code for every controller. Or, of course, you could have a single controller and just use routes to make your URIs appear to map to different controllers.

In CI, Controllers are sub-classes of a Controller class, which is just a CI library. This means you can extend it with your own classes. Typically it's best to put the extra classes in a MY_Controller.php library file, then have your controllers extend MY_Controller (or other classes that extend Controller). This location isn't necessary because CI instantiates YOUR controller class (as determined by the Router class), so the additional controller class or classes just need to be included somehow. Going with the previously explained way is favored just because it follows CI conventions already. If CI sees that there is a MY_Controller.php library, it's going to automatically load it. Might as well piggy-back that process.