[RESOLVED] Class Creation

timus

Hey all

I'm trying to create a class to show search results but I'd like the class to persist rather than have to recreate it every time i reload the page. Once its created, it will have the number of results and other info about the original query and I'd rather not be getting this info each time I view the next page of results.

I believe I can create this class within the session, but is this the best (or only way) that save me from recreating the class each time?

Any thoughts would be most welcome

Thanks

Tim

Weedpacket

Um, you mean an object, right?
You have to store it somewhere between page requests, otherwise you will have to reconstruct it, obviously. And it is for this purpose that session variables were created.

The hairiest part is that the class definition has to be included in the page before session_start() is called, otherwise PHP won't be able to restore its functionality.

timus

Thanks for the reply Weed,

Yes i did mean object, I can create the object in the session as you said, but are there any problems with this? Speed or size restrictions? Just looking for the best practise at the moment...

Thanks

Tim

vaaaska

I'm not sure why you'd want to store it?

Speed: if you build something well it will likely not be a problem.
Size: that's a relative matter.

Build it...and if it's slow or bloated try reducing things. Being too concerned about speed and size usually is an impediment.

timus

Thanks for the reply

Basically just wanted to store some of the properties of the class. In the non-object version i was just storing the number of records, what the user searched for etc in the session, I could still do that and every time i create the object check those values aren't set but I wanted to know what the best practise was

Thanks again

Tim

Weedpacket

If the records don't change very much then there probably is a performance penalty incurred by requerying on every page; however, if there are many records (as would be expected if pagination is necessary) then the amount of session data stored can be large (and if the data is volatile, the cached copy in the session may go stale while it's being viewed ... then again, this may be desirable).

A tradeoff is that disk access time is extremely slow compared with core access (and any decent DBMS would store active data in core); but database communication is complex and time-consuming compared with deserialising a sessioned object.

All this depends on your precise circumstances; one rule of thumb though is that storage is cheap but time is short.