Psss <select>'s value and text

jrahma

Hi,

I have a <form> in my page and I passing it using JQuery's serialize()

I want to now how can I pass the value ad text of my <select> [cboCategory] to PHP? I am curremtly passing the value only!

Thanks,
Jassim

NogDog

My first question would be: why do you need a value and some text? Doesn't your application already know which text goes with which value? Or, if you only really need the text, why not make that the value?

In any case, if you really need both, how about just putting both into the option's value attribute in some sort of delimited format that would make it easy to parse them out.

jrahma

I know the value and it's been populated from the database already but when submitting the form, I need to save the value as foreign key and at the same time send an email to the customer wit the text in the email subject and I don't want to slow the process by adding one more query to retrieve the text from the value

NogDog

I suspect this is a case of premature optimization -- don't underestimate the power and speed of modern DBMS's, as long as your data design is reasonable and properly indexed. In any case, if it really is an issue, you could implement some sort of caching on the query to get the associated text (or put both the value and the text in the option value as suggested above), but unless you're expecting dozens of form submissions per second, I really don't think you need to worry.

Bonesnap

I agree with NogDog. The whole reason you're storing the corresponding text in the database is to keep it organized in one place and to be able to retrieve it whenever you need to.

Reading from the database is cheap; writing is what's expensive.

jrahma

but won't reading it from the database slow the performance as it will add one more query during the process?

NogDog

Anything and everything you do in a program takes time -- the question is if/when/where it takes too much time. Executing a DB query does not necessarily take too much time. Once you have your DB connection established, doing 3 queries instead of 2, for example, does not necessarily mean you're adding a bunch of processing time. If, in order to avoid that 3rd query, you instead have to read a config file with the association of values to texts and then process it to find the desired text, you may well take more time than just doing the query in the first place.

We have a web service at work that gets hammered during peak hours (hundreds of requests per minute) that on average probably does a about 2 dozen queries per call, and typical end-to-end processing is maybe half a second per web service request (2 web servers, just 1 DB server shared by them). So really I would not lose sleep over one more simple select query. 🙂 Now, that's not to say you can't consider other alternatives, but make sure that you're sure those other alternatives are, in fact, measurably and noticeably faster, or you may be wasting time and creating needless complexity for a false sense of optimization.

Vind1975

Thanks for the help in this question, I too consider, that the easier, the better …