CodeIgniter autoload exceptions

Published on Wednesday, 17 June 2009.

CodeIgniter's autoload feature is really nice for avoiding the boring task of loading common libraries (for example: database, session, or a custom library). But what happens when you need to avoid autoloading some libraries in a specific controller?

I googled for a bit, before reading the source. So here's a way of NOT autoloading libraries in specific controllers: just overwrite the _ci_initialize() method to look like this:

<?php
    /*
        The only difference is that calls to _ci_autoloader() were removed.
     */
    function _ci_initialize()
    {
        // Assign all the class objects that were instantiated by the
        // front controller to local class variables so that CI can be
        // run as one big super object.
        $classes = array(
                            'config'    => 'Config',
                            'input'     => 'Input',
                            'benchmark' => 'Benchmark',
                            'uri'       => 'URI',
                            'output'    => 'Output',
                            'lang'      => 'Language',
                            'router'    => 'Router'
                            );
        
        foreach ($classes as $var => $class)
        {
            $this->$var =& load_class($class);
        }

        // In PHP 5 the Loader class is run as a discreet
        // class.  In PHP 4 it extends the Controller
        if (floor(phpversion()) >= 5)
        {
            $this->load =& load_class('Loader');
        }
        else
        {
            // sync up the objects since PHP4 was working from a copy
            foreach (array_keys(get_object_vars($this)) as $attribute)
            {
                if (is_object($this->$attribute))
                {
                    $this->load->$attribute =& $this->$attribute;
                }
            }
        }
    }
?>

You could also create a special Controller and extend from it to avoid repeating code. Why would you ever want to do this? Think about calling a CI controller and action from a cron job. Or an optimized version of any page that really does not need sessions nor authentication to be loaded.

I'm putting this out there not because it's a clever solution (it is not), but to hopefully save some time searching for that non-existent option to disable autoload for some controllers; at least I couldn't find it :(. So please let me know if that exists.

CodeIgniter autoload exceptions

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