Say hello to my new library: Postal

I did it again. It’s a new library called Postal (don’t tell me how I came up with this title…). It’s a library that will allow you to pass informational messages between requests.

This library is using the CodeIgniter’s session library to pass the messages between the requests. As usual, it all started from using another library. The Jens Seger Message library (https://github.com/jenssegers/codeigniter-message-library) was a good library, but I thought it needed improvements. But working with CodeIgniter 3, I told myself why not create another library and start all over.

So, meet my new library, CodeIgniter Postal (https://github.com/avenirer/CodeIgniter-Postal).

This one is simply to use. You only have to copy the Postal.php into your application/libraries, do a $this->load->library(‘postal’); and you’re ready to go.

You can add messages by using the add() method:

$this->postal->add("An error has occurred", "error");
$this->postal->add("The page was updated", "success");
$this->postal->add("How are you?", "message");

You can actually group the messages (and the delimiters between the message groups) in any way you need to by creating a postal.php file inside the application/config library and writing something like this:

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

$config['message_types'] = array(
'jumacara' => array('<div class="whatever">', '</div>'),
'bacabaca' => array('<div class="classy-name">', '</div>'),
'tikituku' => array('<div class="you-want">', '</div>'));

If you do this, the message groups from the configuration file will be used and not “success”, “error”, nor “message”.

You can display the messages in any other controller by using the get() method:

 

echo $this->postal->get(); // THIS WILL RETURN ALL THE MESSAGES AS A STRING

echo $this->postal->get('error'); // THIS WILL ONLY RETURN THE MESSAGES FROM A SPECIFIC GROUP OF MESSAGES

echo $this->postal->get(array('success','error')); // THIS WILL ONLY RETURN THE MESSAGES FROM SPECIFIED GROUPS

$messages = $this->postal->get(NULL, TRUE); // THIS WILL RETURN ALL MESSAGES AS AN ARRAY, WITHOUT ANY MESSAGE DELIMITERS

$messages = $this->postal->get('error', TRUE); // THIS WILL ONLY RETURN THE MESSAGES FROM A SPECIFIC GROUP OF MESSAGES, WITHOUT ANY MESSAGE DELIMITERS

$messages = $this->postal->get(array('success','error'), TRUE); // THIS WILL ONLY RETURN THE MESSAGES FROM SPECIFIED GROUPS, WITHOUT ANY MESSAGE DELIMITERS

Simple, isn’t it?

You can read more about it on the Github page.

I sure hope you will like it.