Limits on passing data

a_r_d

Hi,

I am currently writing a script which interacts with databases. I have written a class for this for a new project im working on, but have come up against a potential problem and im not sure which way to go.

So I run a query and it returns a single result, that is returned via an array to the page that called it. When I run a query which returns multiple rows, is it better to:

a. create a multi dimensional array with the details in and then return this big array of data back to the page that called it.

b. have the page that called the query loop through the output row by row?

at the moment im option for solution a, but i wondered if there would be any downsides? memory limits reached etc if there is a huge amount of data being passed?

Hope someone can point me in the right direction 😕

Thanks 🙂

ixalmida

You haven't really explained why the original page POSTs to some other page instead of itself. If you are grabbing data for the same page, just point the form to the original page. Then somewhere on your original page, check to see if one of your form variables posted to trigger your processing code.

If you actually have to pass large amounts of data between pages for some reason, you might consider just storing the data in a file or database temporarily. That's one of the reasons they came up with XML.

NogDog

If you are going to loop through the results in order to build the array, and then loop through the array to do something with it, it probably will save some processing time to "cut out the middleman" and just pass the query result resource and let the client code do the looping. But the difference is probably generally nothing much to worry about unless/until you get to some unknown value of a "large" amount of data.

If you are using the MySQLi extension, mysqli_result::fetch_all() does the work for you to return the entire result set as an array, and this might help split the difference in efficiency, as the array would be built by the compiled function and not your script's code.