Question

I have a table of options in a database and I want to pull these out of the database and have them all be defined using the define(“DEF_NAME”, “DEF_VALUE”), but since they are pulled out of a database they do not have quotations marks around them.

this is the code I currently use:

$strOptionName          = $rowDBOptions["strOptionName"];
$strOptionNameUpper = strtoupper($strOptionName);
$strOptionValue     = $rowDBOptions["strOptionValue"];
$inttblOptionsType      = $rowDBOptions["strOptionType"];

define($strOptionNameUpper, $strOptionValue);

The only issue is that I receive notices regarding undefined variables. Does anybody know of another option or method to create definitions from database variables?

Answer 1

Your code should work fine, my own personal method for extracting config from a database goes something like this:

Config database table has a ‘key’ ie. GLOBAL_TAX_RATE and a value, ie. 0.25

Query looks like:

SELECT conf_key, conf_value FROM config_options

PHP (after database connection / query execution) looks like:

while ($ROW = mysql_fetch_assoc($QRY)) {

  define($ROW['conf_key'],$ROW['conf_value']);

}

And you end up with a nice way to define all of your constants from the database without having to explicitly add a new statement if you want to add a new key/value pair.

And there are of course variations, such as on busy sites, storing these values in the session and looping through that – and every 10 minutes using a timestamp, or on login/logout, or whatever you need – refresh the config session values from the database to pick up any changes, without having to run a config SELECT every time someone opens a page.