Passing data from a controller to a controller to a model

Question

I'm making a series of quizzes for a website I'm working on and am having a bit of trouble saving the user data. The structure is a bit odd, so that may have something to do with the problems coming up. My quiz controllers are labelled as Quiz1, Quiz2, and so on, and load a function called Quizzer, which is listened to in jquery. Whenever a radio button is clicked on the quiz page, jquery activates Quizzer to record the user input. Here is the sample code:

This is the code that loads the page:

    public function Quiz4(){
    $this->load->view("site_header");
    $this->load->view("site_nav");
    $this->load->model("quiz_model");
    $this->data['choices'] = $this->quiz_model->get_records('quiz_4');
    $this->load->view("student/quiztest", $this->data);

    $quiz = 4;

    $this->Quizzer($quiz);

    $this->load->view("site_footer");
}

The value 4 is passed to Quizzer so it knows which quiz to write to in the database.

This is the controller Quizzer:

    public function Quizzer($qid){
    $this->load->model("quiz_model");
    $user = $this->ion_auth->user()->row();
    $user_id = $user->id;
    $data = array(
        'answer' => $this->input->post('answer')
    );
    $question = $this->input->post('question');

            echo $qid;

    $this->quiz_model->update_record($data, $user_id, $qid, $question);
}

$user_id tells which user is logged in $data and $question identify which radio button the user clicked from which group.

$qid should indicate which quiz page the user is on, and in the case of this test it echoed out a 4, so I know that it is picking up data, but it still won't write to the database. I found that manually typing in 4 instead of $qid would make the function work, but the current $qid variable won't be accepted.

This is the model function that does the saving to the database:

    function update_record($data, $uid, $quiz, $question)
{
    echo $quiz;
    $this->db->where('uid', $uid);
    $this->db->where('quiz', (int)$quiz);
    $this->db->where('question', $question);
    $this->db->update('quiz_results', $data);
}

I tried casting $quiz to int in an attempt to get the data types to match, but this trick is not working either. Based on how the function behaves when I manually type in a 4 versus passing it as a variable makes it seem like it's a problem with the type of data(which is why I tried to typecast).

Answer 1

If your quiz_model is designed correctly, instead of this:

$this->quiz_model->update_record($data, $user_id, $qid, $question);

..you should be doing:

$this->quiz_model->data = $data;
$this->quiz_model->user_id = $user_id;
...
$this->quiz_model->update();

Also, you should have a single Quiz controller, not multiple QuizN controllers. And finally, it's generally considered bad design to have controllers call other controllers. I've gotten into situations where I felt I had to, but it should be avoided. To that end, what does your Quiz controller offer that your Quizzer controller couldn't encapsulate so that you have no Quiz controller at all?

Cheers