Trying to stick a lot of data into session variable - failing, outputting to screen

bunner_bob

I'm working on the admin portion of an ecommerce site, where the admin can filter and export customers for Excel. The process basically goes like this:

Run a query to get all the customers. On each customer, run several queries to get info about number of past orders, current credit status, any certifications and their statuses, etc.
Iterate through all the results into an HTML template and set that as a session variable.
Display the number of results as a link.
Clicking the link sets headers for MS-Excel and echoes the content of the session variable as an attachment with a .xls filename.
Browser prompts to download or open in Excel and all displays as expected.

As long as I have less than 5780 records everything works fine. As soon as I hit 5781 records, instead of getting the filter UI and number-of-results screen, I get the output of the session variable directly to screen.

It looks like ALL the records are there. Nothing is getting lost. I viewed source and copied/pasted into text, and it opens in Excel with all data present. But I seem to have exceeded some threshold of size or time or something and so PHP is refusing to execute the rest of my code. The file size looks to be about 1.1MB.

I'm still troubleshooting, but does this raise any flags? Is it possible there's a php config value that isn't set properly, or should be increased?

Thanks!

Weedpacket

I don't know of any size thresholds in session data, but

bunner bob wrote:
Is it possible there's a php config value that isn't set properly, or should be increased?

Have you looked? 🙂

2. Iterate through all the results into an HTML template and set that as a session variable. ... 4. ... echoes the content of the session variable as an attachment

A better design might be to hold off all that HTML formatting until you're ready to output the data. Then you only need to store the data, not all the formatting as well.

1. Run a query to get all the customers. On each customer, run several queries to get info about number of past orders, current credit status, any certifications and their statuses, etc.

This could possibly be done with one query (running additional queries based on the results returned by a previous query is a symptom of poor design). Of more immediate interest, you could store the information required to make the query in the session, and hold of making the query until you're ready to work with the data (i.e., when you're collating it for output). In the previous step you'd only need to get the database to count the number of results.

If you do have to store all this data through intermediate pages, have you considered using a database?

bunner_bob

Well it was the memory_limit after all. 32MB wasn't cutting it so I upped to 64.

Yes, the chain of queries is bad design. I built it several years ago and it could use a rework but it isn't a feature the client uses often so there's no budget to refactor.

Good thinking on storing just the data and not the formatting - can pull into my template at output instead of before saving in the session var.

Thanks!