I was recently tasked with a situation where I needed to populate about 10 different "Settings" for every user in the current database.
This example is specifically for CakePHP, however, it could easily be used elsewhere. My goal was the following, I had an array that was key value paired as follows:
array(
[0] => array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 1)
),
[1] => array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 2)
),
[2] => array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 3)
),
[3] => array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 4)
),
)
The result I needed was as follows:
array(
[0] => array(
'UserSetting' => array(
'user_id' => 1)
),
[1] => array(
'UserSetting' => array(
'user_id' => 2)
),
[2] => array(
'UserSetting' => array(
'user_id' => 3)
),
[3] => array(
'UserSetting' => array(
'user_id' => 4)
),
)
With a few simple lines of code, I was able to quickly and easily achieve this, let me show you how.
First, let me explain that I was dealing with over 100,000 users and I did not want to do a straight loop and update. I felt too much processing time and memory would be used for this to work well on a production server that was very active.
Instead, using the array_map() function and a custom function performed this process for me extremely quickly and efficiently.
Below is my sample code that I created to test out my function:
The above code passes in the $users array to the fix_element() function that I created. The whole thing with the &$this is needed because this is inside a CakePHP controller.
The fix_element() function is called once for each element in the array. I know I know, I said I didn't want to loop through each element, the key to that statement, is that I didn't want to. I'm letting PHP do it, which is a lot faster than a foreach statement.
The function replaces $elem['User']['id'] with $elem['UserSetting']['user_id'], exactly the result I wanted.
My finish product loops through an array of my 10 different user settings and adds my other keys for my UserSetting array and I call a saveAll() with my entire array of users, once for each setting.
I don't remember exactly how long the code took to run, but it saved over 1,000,000 records in under 5 minutes, probably around the 2 or 3 minute range. Published on Mar 19, 2009 Tags: CakePHP Tutorial
| PHP
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Jamie Munro is the author of ASP.NET MVC 5 with Bootstrap and Knockout.js,
Knockout.js: Building Dynamic Client-Side Web Applications,
20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3,
and 20 Recipes for Programming PhoneGap. He has been developing websites and web applications for over 20 years. Jamie began his writing career in 2009. As the success of Jamie's blog grew, he turned his writing passion to books about web development in hopes that his many years of experience could be passed on to his readers. No matter the programming language you're looking to learn, I've hopefully compiled an incredible set of tutorials for you to learn; whether you are beginner
or an expert, there is something for everyone to learn. Each topic I go in-depth and provide many examples throughout. I can't wait for you to dig in
and improve your skillset with any of the tutorials below.
...
// get all user ids
$this->User->recursive = -1;
$users = $this->User->find('all', array('fields'=>'id', 'limit' => 10));
$tmp = array_map(array(&$this, 'fix_element'), $users);
var_dump($tmp);
...
function fix_element($elem) {
return array("UserSetting" => array("user_id" => $elem['User']['id']));
}
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