Inheritance in CodeIgniter

I am building a series of forms, and I am trying to inherit the functionality of a parent Form class into all the forms. For example,

LeaveForm extends Form开发者_运维技巧 _^(Model)

LeaveFormController extends FormController

I am handling all the leave form specific stuff in LeaveFormController and LeaveForm.

In LeaveFormController constructor, I simply call the parent class constructor, then load the LeaveForm Model. And in FormController constructor, I load Form model.

My problem is, I get an error,

Cannot redeclare class form in Form.php

Have I got my architecture wrong? How do I handle this ?

check if the class has already been initialized like this:

if (!class_exists('classname'))
{
    // ok fine create new instance now
}

Possibly when you $this->load->model('Form'), you manually included the models/form.php file?

In your leaveform.php model file, make sure you load the superclass model you extend using codeigniter's model loading mechanism instead of require or include. Codeigniter has a loader that keeps track of already-loaded files to avoid redeclaring classes, but you need to use $this->load to use it. It won't know about files loaded directly with include or require.

So at the top of leaveform.php, use this:

$CI =& get_instance(); $CI->load->model('Form');

This is not related, but you will have pain unless you namespace your CodeIgniter model classes the same way you namespace Controller classes.

Try using FormModel extends CI_Model {}; Instead of Form extends CI_Model {};