Jim Lucas wrote:
This question should probably be directed at the PHP Internals list, but
I thought I would start by asking here first if anybody would even use
this feature.
It has been brought to my attention that with Perl and Ruby, you can use
Objects as the value of the key within an array. The examples that were
shown to me make me think that this would be an awesome ability to have
within PHP.
Here is an example of how I would use such a feature.
I have a table of "customers".
I have a table customers "contact_locations".
This table has a reference ID back to the "customers" table.
Now, in my array of information that I build I have this.
$res = query('Select c_id, c_first_name, c_last_name FROM customers');
$customers = array();
while ( $row = fetch_assoc($res) ) {
$customers[$row]['contact_locations'] = array();
$SQL = "SELECT *
FROM contact_locations
WHERE c_id={$row['c_id']}";
$loc_res = query($SQL);
while ( $loc_row = fetch_assoc($loc_res) ) {
$customers[$row]['contact_locations'][] = $loc_row;
}
}
Now, contained within one array "$customers" I have all the information
that would be needed for displaying any type of information related to a
customer or a customers location.
By doing having this feature, I could build the ability to do xPath
searches within the base array. That would be nice.
Anyways, what do you all think? Worth it or not?
Jim Lucas
Maybe I don't get the new concept, but what would be wrong with:
// START CODE //
$cid = null;
$customers = array();
while ( $row = fetch_assoc($res) ) {
$cid = $row['cid'];
$customers[$cid] = $row;
$customers[$cid]['contact_locations'] = array();
$SQL = "SELECT *
FROM contact_locations
WHERE c_id={$cid}";
$loc_res = query($SQL);
while ( $loc_row = fetch_assoc($loc_res) ) {
$customers[$cid]['contact_locations'][] = $loc_row;
}
}
// END CODE //
Now you can easily reference all of your customers by ID and get any of
the data you want. I would actually just load the record I want from
the database and not chew up all that memory, but this is just an
example anyway.
I guess it could allow you to somewhat consolidate a two-dimensional
array down to a single dimension. In order to use the data, you'd have
to use array_keys() or something similar to use it though.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't know how practical it would be.
--
Ray Hauge
www.primateapplications.com
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