I was trying out CodeIgniter’s Form Helper the other day. I came across one issue with form_radio. I could not get the submitted results to display properly. I’m using radio buttons to show a priority with a range that goes from 1 to 5. I tried several suggestions from the CodeIgniter’s Forum, but none of them seem to work. This article discusses an alternative way to get form_radio to display submitted data properly.

First of all, let’s go through the basics.

The Basics

To load CodeIgniter’s Form Helper, we will add this code to our controller.

$this->load->helper(‘form’);

Once the form helper is loaded, we can now start using the built-in functions like:

echo form_open(‘email/send’);

which is similar to:

<form method=”post” action=”http:/example.com/email/send” />

Form_Radio

Here’s the form_radio function:

echo form_radio(‘var’, ’1′, TRUE);

Which is similar to:

<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ checked=”checked” />

My Code

echo form_radio(‘var’, ’1′, set_radio(‘var’, ’1′));
echo form_radio(‘var’, ’2′, set_radio(‘var’, ’2′));
echo form_radio(‘var’, ’3′, set_radio(‘var’, ’3′));
echo form_radio(‘var’, ’4′, set_radio(‘var’, ’4′));
echo form_radio(‘var’, ’5′, set_radio(‘var’, ’5′));

But, this code doesn’t seem to display the submitted value properly.

Suggestions

Here’s a couple of suggestions from the User Guide:

echo form_radio(‘var’, ’1′, set_radio(‘var’, ’1′));

Or

<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php echo set_radio(‘var’, ’1′, TRUE); ?> />

Both examples didn’t work for me. I ended up using the code below.

Solution

By the way, the variable “$row->var” is the submitted data.

<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’1′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />1

I could use a ternary as well …

<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php echo ($row->var==’1′) ? ‘checked=”checked”‘ : ”; ?> />1

Final Code

Here’s my final code.

<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’1′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />1
<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’2′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />2
<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’3′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />3
<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’4′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />4
<input type=”radio” name=”var” value=”1″ <?php if ($row->var==’5′) echo ‘checked=”checked”‘; ?> />5

The end result is, only one radio button is selected based on submmited data. There is nothing like using some old-fashioned PHP and HTML markup to display submitted data properly.