Active record db inserting in codeigniter - codeigniter

Question

I'm working on a project (using codeigniter) where I use a lot of Active record .
The problem i'm facing is the following :
I receive an array of data and i have to fill few tables by using :
$this->db->insert('db_name', $data);
Now sometime $data contains elements not available inside the table so instead i have to do something like :
unset($data['action']);
unset($data['date']);
Before inserting or I just build another array that contains the exact same element of a specific table .
$arr = array( 'x' => $data['x'])
I already used Kohana before and i know when you insert using the ORM it just ignores elements not available in a specific table .
Is there something like that in Codeigniter ?
PS) Without using any external library

Answer 1

CI ActiveRecord is not an ORM. If you want to use an ORM with codeignter, your only option is to use a third-party library: http://datamapper.wanwizard.eu/
You can always loop through the array before sending it to the db and unset data that doesn't contain anything (if in fact the delineator is an empty element):
foreach($data as $k => $v){
if($v == ''){
unset($data[$k]);
}
}
Otherwise, you could create switch spaghetti to unset the elements based on the db and the page sending the data:
switch ($page){
case "page1":
unset($data['blah']);
break;
....
}

Answer 2

As far as I'm aware the built-in feature like that doesn't exist in CI's Active Record (by the way, it is not an ORM).
If unsetting the array elements manually is too much of a hassle, the auto proccess would look like:
function my_insert ($table, $data) {
$query = $this->db->query('SHOW columns FROM '.$table);
$columns = array();
foreach ($query->result_array() as $row) {
$columns[] = $row['Field'];
}
foreach ($data AS $key => $value) {
if (!in_array($key, $columns)) {
unset($data[$key]);
}
}
$this->db->insert($table, $data);
}
It's not tested and some other checks may be needed, but that should help you to take off.