Calling one php script from another

[tdlo]

All,

I don't know if this is possible, but here's what I'm trying to do:

• I have a PHP script that receives an XML document from a web application.
• It extracts data from that XML doc, and saves it to a database.
• If certain conditions are met, it sends the user an email
• I returns a confirmation to the web application

The problem is that the email step slows the process down. So, what I'd like to do with that script is this:

• receive the XML document from a web application
• extracts data from the XML doc save it to the database
• If certain conditions are met, call another script that sends the user an email
• Without waiting for a response from that other script, return a confirmation to the web application

IOW, I would like to make the successful execution of the main script completely independent from the success of the second script (the emailer script).

Is there an easy way to do this?

Cheers,
Matt Stuehler

[bradgrafelman]

Yeah. Have your script setup to receive arguements using $_GET, and call it on the command line while forking the new process into the background so as not to wait for the script to complete:

exec('/path/to/php -f myScript.php arg1 arg2 arg3 etc &'); // the & forks into background

NOTE: This assumes three things: 1) Your host is running a Unix server, 2) You have access to run system commands via exec(), and 3) You can execute the PHP executable (either because you know the path, or you can simply use 'php -f...' since a symlink or something else was placed in a bin for easy access).