[thelist] PHP Previous Next Navigation

[jyee]

I myself would still use MySQL to generate the results, but if you're sure
that you want to do this, then I would suggest using the session handling
functions in PHP to persist your array across pages, as it would be much
better than encoding a thousand records in a form and submitting it via GET or
POST.

To use the functions, you need to register the variable that you want to use,
such as

session_register('Records');

, on every page that requires the records.  Afterwards, you can do a simple
assignment and fill up the array:

$Records = array();

while ($Row = mysql_fetch_row($Result))
{
  $Records[] = $Row[0];
}

On every page afterwards, $Records will be automatically loaded as a global
variable and is ready for use, so if you wanted records 2010 through 2020,
then you would simply do

$Begin = 2010;
$End = $Begin + 10

for ($i = $Begin; $i < $End;  $i++)
{
  // Output records
}

where you can embed $Begin as a value in your next or previous links.

The documentation for the session handling functions are at

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

Good luck with the project, and feel free to contact me if you have any code
questions.  I use session handling on my website to store login and timeout
information, and it's been a very convenient way of not having to query my
database on every page.

Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee at vt.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jay Blanchard" <jay.blanchard at niicommunications.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 15:22
Subject: RE: [thelist] PHP Previous Next Navigation


> Simon,
>
> [snip]...stuff about MySQL LIMIT...[/snip]
>
> Thank you for your information. I am aware of and have used LIMIT for many
> queries in MySQL, but there is a problem here that I probably have not been
> clear enough about. These 3000-5000 records exist in a table that has
> millions of records. So for each query with LIMIT MySQL has to traverse all
> of the records right up until it receives the limit amounts back The further
> into the table you go, the worse the delay. The array, if I built one from
> the desired records, would take up less memeory space than most front pages
> on web sites (under 30k), making it rather quick on subsequent "pages". I
> know how easy it is to do this with LIMIT and I wish that I could take
> advantage of it. But I am afraid that speed is the largest issue at this
> point.