Question

I am writing a simple search engine for my database using mysqli and prepared statements, I’m currently using call_user_func_array to dynamically create my query. My question is: is there a faster or better way to do this using mysqli?
here’s my code:

<?php 
session_start();
require('../../../scripts/bkfunctions.php');
header('Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');
header('Content-type: application/json');

//////////////////
$resultParameters = array();
$paramsArr =array();
$results = array();




////DB OPEN//////////////////////////////////////////
$conn = dbConnect("ITbunker");
$paramsArr = explode(",", $_GET['paramsQuery']);
$qStr="";
$bindParams = array('s');

    ////////////////////////////////////
    foreach ($paramsArr as $n=>$k) {

            if ($n==0) {
            $qStr = "SELECT * FROM trabajosEnSubasta WHERE MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)";
            }
            else {
            $qStr .= " UNION SELECT * FROM trabajosEnSubasta WHERE MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)";
            $bindParams[0] .= 's';
            }
            array_push($bindParams, $k);
    }
    ///////////////////////////////////////

    ///Preparar query y ejecutar
    $stmt = $conn->prepare($qStr);
    call_user_func_array(array($stmt, 'bind_param'), makeValuesReferenced($bindParams));
    $stmt->execute();

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////*

$meta = $stmt->result_metadata();  

    while ($campo = $meta->fetch_field() ) {
    $resultParameters[] = &$row[$campo->name];
    }
    call_user_func_array(array($stmt, 'bind_result'), $resultParameters);

    $i=0;
    while ( $stmt->fetch() ) {  
        $i++;
        foreach( $row as $key => $val ) {
        $results["resultado$i"][$key] = $val;
        }  
    }


echo json_encode($results);
///////////////////////////////////////////////////

$conn->close();
?>

Answer 1

You have a lot of things to address in your question – and call_user_func_array isn’t one of them.

Look at your query

This is the sort of query you are building:

SELECT
    * 
FROM 
    trabajosEnSubasta 
WHERE 
    MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)
UNION 
    SELECT
        * 
    FROM 
        trabajosEnSubasta 
    WHERE 
        MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)
UNION 
    SELECT
        ...

And.. it begs the question why you’d do that. This is functionally identical, and likely much faster to execute:

SELECT
    * 
FROM 
    trabajosEnSubasta 
WHERE 
    MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)
    OR
    MATCH(titulo, descripcion, habilidades) AGAINST (?)
    OR
    ...

Look at your logic

$paramsArr = explode(",", $_GET['paramsQuery']);

Therefore requesting a url like /foo?paramsQuery=a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j will currently trigger a 10 table union query, if you update your query syntax, that’ll be a 10 full-text-index query. Is that really what you want? It might be – but for example if someone searches for a known habilidad it’d be a lot more efficient to do:

SELECT
    trabajosEnSubasta.*
FROM
    trabajosEnSubasta
LEFT JOIN
    habilidades_map ON habilidades_map.trabajo_id = trabajosEnSubasta.id
WHERE
    habilidades_map.habilidad = "known habilidad"

A full-text index is relatively expensive to query, and shouldn’t really be your only means of searching your data.

Profile your code

I have to assume you’re asking about call_user_func_array because your code is slow to execute. Don’t guess where problems are in code look and find out.

• Use explain to see what your queries are doing
• Use xdebug profiling to see where your code is spending it’s time
• Webgrind is an easy to install means of seeing xdebug profile output.

Dont waste your time optimizing 0.01%

call_user_func_array does have a cost to use, and that’s why code like this exists. BUT the difference is really, really insignificant (especially in light of the super-heavy UNION queries in the question) unless you’re calling it hundreds+ times. Focus on the things that have the biggest performance impact on your application, not the things that make absolutely no measurable difference one way or the other.