CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascript
gordyr
gordyr

Reputation: 6276

Storing users 'following' during a PHP session

I have a simple followers/following system set up within my app.

What would be the best way to store a complete array of 'users following' during a session so that I don't have to query the database multiple times throughout.

To clarify: When a user logs in once they have been authorized I query the database, get a full list of users that the logged in user is following and ultimately store it as a JavaScript variable. This way throughout the site, as the user navigates around I can constantly check the following status against any other user they may come across.

This query is only performed once when the user loads the full page, while navigating around it is not repeated.

This works well for javascript generated content i.e user hovercards etc...

However I would like to store this array (of only userid's) in PHP itself so that I can prevent further queries to the following table while generating content server side that requires a 'follower/following' check to be performed.

What would be the best way to do this?

Please bare in mind that the results are cached in memcached but if I can avoid any lookups at all and have a consistent array to check against that would be great.

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 73

Answers (3)

thewebguy
thewebguy

Reputation: 1520

The two ways that come to mind would be to just write joins with well placed indexes each time, which you've said you don't want to do, and just a simple array in the session, which would probably look something like this:

if (!isset($_SESSION['following']) {
    $following = $user->getFollowingIds(); //some query in here to get an array of ids
    $_SESSION['following'] = $following;
    $_SESSION['following_str'] = implode(',', $following);
}

Then whenever you want to pull all of the statuses for the people that $user is following you can write a query, something like this:

$query('SELECT status.* FROM status WHERE user_id IN (' . $_SESSION['following_str'] . ')'); //not sanitized or safe but you get the idea

Upvotes: 1

Henrik Ammer
Henrik Ammer

Reputation: 1899

Store it in the session variable.

UPDATE

Store the current user in a session and add it to the queries you are already doing to fetch the popup information and add that it tests if the popups person follows the current user.

Upvotes: 1

Sammaye
Sammaye

Reputation: 43884

So let me get this right, you want to store this list so it isn't queried on each page?

First I would recommend you only perform this query on pages that need this data and second I would say that on these pages you don't try this.

Imagine a user stops following or starts following. Some complex cache calculator or event bubbler programmed into your own PHP app to purge the foreign session of data (which is bad, the user has access to data that is not their own, a session infact) could be tiedious with security and performance.

The better thing to do is to perform the query again for each new page. This would be much easier, probably more performant and wouldn't be micro-optimising.

Edit

If you are picking out 10k rows on one page then you might be doing something wrong. You might be looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Upvotes: 2

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