Web Services?

[eluser]Teks[/eluser]
According to REST principles, the function in your controller that will be called should depend on the HTTP REQUEST-METHOD. It is more-or-less accepted, that the basic CRUD operations should be mapped to the request methods GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, like this:

* POST = Create
* GET = Read
* PUT = Update
* DELETE = Delete

The problem with this, is that CodeIgniter's routing mechanism by default does NOT take into consideration the HTTP REQUEST-METHOD. Those articles above show you a couple of techniques that will patch the built-in routing mechanism with your own class, so that the REQUEST-METHOD can dictate which function in your controller gets called.

So, in practice, it would work like this - let's suppose I have a database of recipes, which are accessible on the 'net via a RESTful interface. Let's suppose my site is "www.teksrecipes.com", and that I have a controller called 'recipes' that handles everything.

Let's suppose that I want to create a new recipe, for chocolate cake, in my database. I could send a PUT request, with the relevant data, to:

http://www.teksrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_cake.html

Because the request is a PUT request, it should be directed to the appropriate "create()" function in my "recipes.php" controller.

In order to later retrieve the chocolate cake recipe, I would send a GET request to the same address:

http://www.teksrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_cake.html

If I wanted to *update* the recipe, I would access *the same address*, but using a POST request instead, with the updated information:

http://www.teksrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_cake.html

If I wanted to *delete* the chocolate cake recipe, I would access the same address again, but using a DELETE request:

http://www.teksrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_cake.html

I hope this helps.