System Design Question

Cine

Hi there,

I need a little advice on how I should design a system.

The systems involves a user first logging in, then directed to a home page in which they're able to subscribe to certain jobs.

My question is regarding gathering the logged in users details, such as their name etc.

Is it better 'design-wise' to get these details once the user has logged in with use of a User class which connects to a database, and assign properties in the class to the user details respectively.

Is it better to simply get any user information when there's a direct need for it, which means calling some static get method in the User class which connects to the database and get's that particular detail.

When I say 'better' I mean, which method is more efficient speed wise, and which is good general programming style.

Thanks in advance.

leatherback

I would say this is very much dependent on your site. If you have a site on which each page uses specific user information, you could consider storing this information in a session, and safe yourself a lot of database calls. If however, every one in so many pages need the info, then only call for it when you need it. However, I would never store any real personal information in a session.

Naturally, if you know that once you need firstname in the page, you will later also need other details, it would be elegant to get the information you need for the whole page in one go.

sneakyimp

Getting information only when there's a direct need for it sounds like a good way to conserve RAM and possibly disk space, but at the cost of making your coding job really tedious. I would imagine that if a user is logged in, the obvious thing to do would be to fetch all the data in that user's database record and put it in a var named $current_user or something like that so you can refer to it whenever you like without having to check if it's already been fetched.

NogDog

If we're going the OOP route, then you would presumably have some sort of User object instantiated once you validate the user and obtain his data from the DB. You can then store that object in your session data. As mentioned above, though, you need to consider what to do if there is any sensitive data in that object, in which case if you're on a shared host and don't want that data floating around in a session data file on the server, you could implement a database-driven session-handler. Of course, this then somewhat reduces whatever performance advantage you gained by not having to query the DB for the user data. :rolleyes: But since you would also be retrieving all other session data in that same query, I personally would not be too concerned. Note that if you do store the object in the session data, you need to be sure to load the class definition before doing your session_start().

Implementing a Database-Based Session-Handler

logon68

i agreed with you sneakyimp

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