Question

Before anything, this is not necessarily a question.. But I really want to know your opinion about the performance and possible problems of this “mode” of search.

I need to create a really complex search on multiple tables with lots of filters, ranges and rules… And I realize that I can create something like this:

1. Submit the search form
2. Internally I run every filter and logic step-by-step (this may take some seconds)
3. After I find all the matching records (the result that I want) I create a record on my searches table generating a token of this search (based on the search params) like 86f7e437faa5 and save all the matching records IDs
4. Redirect the visitor to a page like mysite.com/search?token=86f7e437faa5

And, on the results page I only need to discover what search i’m talking about and page the results IDs (retrieved from the searches table).

This will make the refresh & pagination much faster since I don’t need to run all the search logic on every pageview. And if the user change a filter or search criteria, I go back to step 2 and generate a new search token.

I never saw a tutorial or something about this, but I think that’s wat some forums like BBForum or Invision do with search, right? After the search i’m redirect to sometihng like search.php?id=1231 (I don’t see the search params on the URL or inside the POST args).

This “token” will no last longer than 30min~1h.. So the “static search” is just for performance reasons.

What do you think about this? It’ll work? Any consideration? 🙂

Answer 1

Seems logical enough to me.

Having said that, given the description of you application, have you considered using Sphinx. Regardless of the number of tables and/or filters and/or rules, all that time consuming work is in the indexing, and is done beforehand/behind the scene. The filtering/rules/fields/tables is all done quickly and on the fly after the fact.

So, similar to your situation, Sphinx could give you your set of ID’s very quickly, since all the hard work was pre-done.