Question

I am implementing a snippet-based content management system into my current project. Snippets can be associated with a page either by exact match of the full url falling back to a wildcard match on a partial url or finally a default snippet.

To implement this I have a created table of page associations with a wildcard flag, the system first checks the current url against the non-wildcard associations and if it doesn’t find a match it checks against the partial url’s where the wildcard flag is set.

In order to achieve this I am getting all the partial url’s from the database and putting them into an array then walking the array to check for a match against the current url:

protected function _check_wildcard($url = NULL)
{
    if($url)
    {
        $q = $this->db->where('wildcard' ,'Y')
                ->from('content')
                ->get();
        $wildcards = $q->result_array();

        foreach($wildcards AS $wildcard)
        {
            if(strpos($url,$wildcard['url']) !== FALSE )
            {
                return $wildcard['snippet_id'];
            }
        }
    }
    else
    {
        return NULL;
    }
}

Can anyone suggest a better way to do this – preferably one that doesn’t involve having to constantly download the full list of all the wildcards each time I load a page as I am afraid that this will have a negative effect on the scalability of the system down the line?

Answer 1

You could query your database directly instead of loading all the wildcards. Assuming MySQL, this query checks for the wildcard URL in the given URL string. Ex :

// Keeping your current wildcard = 'Y' condition and adding the wildcard check.
$where = "wildcard = 'Y' AND INSTR('" . $url . "', url) > 0 ";
$this->db->where($where)->from('content')->get();

You can check for your database’s documentation to see if it supports INSTR or a similar function.

If this query returns no rows, you can return NULL and if it has a row, you can return the first snippet_id.

Hope this helps!