As we display records on the publicly-accessible Internet, it is often desirable to keep track of how many times a specific record has been accessed. The hit() member function of JTable can do this, assuming that your table has a column named hits. To demonstrate this, add a function named showCritic() with the following code to the controller in the /components/com_critic/critic.php file:

function showCritic()
{
$id = JRequest::getInt('id', 0);
$row =& JTable::getInstance('critic', 'Table');
$row->load($id);
$row->hit($id);
?>
<p><strong><?php echo $row->name; ?></strong></p>
<p>Favorite food: <?php echo $row->favorite_food; ?></p>
<p><?php echo $row->bio; ?></p>
<?php
}

The function first extracts id from the request and makes sure that it is an integer. After this, a reference to a TableCritic object is assigned to $row. The load() member function of $row is called to pull...