Displaying php results on the fly possible?

gingar

Hi guys,

I've a page that will at times display up to hundreds of results on a single page.

I've the info stored in an array, so i loop through the array and write it to a $result, and display it after the looping is done.

Is there anyway that I can force display the result to the screen before i finish looping through the array?

This would be helpful so the user doesn't stare at a blank screen waiting for the page to load!

Piranha

You can always use AJAX to do what you want.

Or maybe you should redesign the page in a way that doesn't display hundreds of results on a single page? I know that I would probably just close the page if I saw such a result.

bretticus

instead of building some monolithic string first, why not just spit it out to the buffer during the array loop?

foreach($huge_array AS $element) {
    echo $element . '\n';
}

leatherback

Just not ethat if you output a lot of separate lines individualy to screen, you will creae a massive overhead and it will be much slower.

I would personally probably used Bretticus' solution, but for 30, 40,50 records at a time; Store them. If another 50 records have been retrieved, spit them out.

But note Pirana's comment: WHy are you generating so many elements for a page; can't you break it into a more userfriendly system?

gingar

thanks guys for the replies/suggestions.

its actually a search results for properties, pulled from 4 different xml strings. So its actually easier for users to see all the properties on 1 page rather than having to click next next next to get to the property that they want, and every time they click next, i have to go retrieve all the results from the 4 suppliers and format it all over again, as the information has to be real time.

Would paging really be a better idea?

Would echoing the results during loop actually display the results to screen before the array has been fully processed? I was under the impression that nothing gets displayed to screen until the info is ready to be displayed! :p

bretticus

Realtime? So you couldn't cache your results for say 30 minutes at a time? Between 4 different feeds and all being displayed at once, that's gotta be a relative eternity for the user to wait. Why not use optcode caching to store data serverside? Depending on usage, even a 5-minute cache might save a lot of time and bandwidth.

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) isn't too hard to setup. It does require access to pecl/pear from command line as well as build tools. Might not be available to you if this is paid shared hosting account. If so you might wanna look for it under a phpinfo() or ask your administrator about it. If it's your server, check out installation instructions here.

Your code might look something like this...

<?php
function get_feeds()
{
	if ( apc_fetch('feeds') ) { 
		return apc_fetch('feeds');
	} else { //when cache time is used up, apc_fetch returns false
		// gets feeds via typical method
		//...
		//cache data...
		apc_store('feeds', $feed_data, 300); //5 minutes
               return $feed_data;
	}
}
?>

I suggest doing as leatherback suggested: Buffer a certain amount of printed lines and then spit them out. I guess this is the answer to your very first question...

<?php
// turn on output buffering
ob_start();
// loop results
foreach ($results as $result) {
	// print out results
	echo $result;
	// every 30 records, flush the output buffer.
	if ( ++$counter % 30 == 0 )
		ob_flush();
}
// flush anything that is left over.
ob_end_flush();
?>