Detailed controller

Right so the database is present, but the table doesn't exist. That makes sense, right? After all, we created our database but there's nothing in it, and we told the Employees model it had some fields... So, open up MySQL and run:

CREATE TABLE employees (
    id int AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    name varchar(64) NOT NULL,
    notes varchar(255) NOT NULL,
    department varchar(64) NOT NULL
);

You should get a message like:

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

By default, Li3 looks for a table with the same name as the controller, all in lowercase, so model Foos will look for a table foos

Right! Let's hit this controller again! Back to http://employee-rolodex.localhost/employees!

So, do you remember way back in the mists of time when we built our own controller? It were alllll fields back then... Ah, happy times. Anyway, we need to build some basic templates now.

Create app/views/employees/index.html.php (which is the file the error message reported as missing) and give it the following contents to allow it to show a nice list of employees using the <ul> tag and also to show an "Add" link:

<h2>Employees</h2>
<ul>
<?php
foreach($employees as $employee) {
    ?><li><a href="<?=$this->url(array('Employees::view',
        'args' => array($employee->id)));?>">
            <?=$employee->name?>
        </a></li><?php
}
?>
</ul>
<p><a class="btn btn-large" href="<?= $this->url(array('Employees::add')); ?>">
    Add
</a></p>

You should now see:

YESSSSSSssssss..... It might not look like it, but we have created our first bit of properly dynamic code! Notice the "foreach" loop - it goes through each Employee member and lists hir name.

Next we need to be able to actually ADD employees...