Question

In PHP I know many people will use a class to SET and GET session variables, I am doing this now in many classes, I need to know if I am doing it wrong though.

So for example lets pretend I have A class that need to use this

$session->get('user_id')

Which gets this value

$_SESSION['user_id']

Now in this class if I have 15 methods and in each method I need to access this value several time, currently I am calling $session->get(‘user_id’) 20 times in a class if it is needed 20 times, should I be setting this 1 time per class to a local variable for that class and then access it? I am not sure if it makes any difference or not, my theory is that the way I am doing it now is 20 extra function calls that could be avoided?

If my theory is correct, what would be the best way to store these values inside a class? Like a private or public or protected variable?

Thanks, sorry for any confusio, classes and objects are taking me a while to learn.

Also note that $session->get(‘user_id’) is just 1 of many DIFFERENT variables I would need to do the same thing to as well.

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UPDATE

After reading Chacha102’s post about using an array() … here is what I have tried, does this look like a good way or still can be improved a lot?

class file

<?PHP
class User
{
    // Load user details into an Array
    public function load_user()
    {
        $this->user_id = $this->session->get('user_id');
        //if user ID is already set, then Load the cached urser data
        if(isset($this->user_id) && $this->user_id != ''){
            // set user data to an array
            $this->user['user_id'] = $this->user_id;
            $this->user['user_name'] =  $this->session->get('user_name');
            $this->user['pic_small'] =  $this->session->get('pic_small');
            $this->user['sex'] =  $this->session->get('sex');
            $this->user['user_role'] =  $this->session->get('user_role');
            $this->user['location_lat'] =  $this->session->get('location_lat');
            $this->user['location_long'] =  $this->session->get('location_long');
            $this->user['new_user'] =  $this->session->get('new_user');
            return  $this->user;
        }
    }
}
?>

main page file

<?PHP   
require 'user.class.php';

$user = new User;

// if a user_id is set into a session variable then we return an array of other user related data
$user->account = $user->load_user();

// would show the user's ID from our array
echo $user->account['user_id'];
?>

Answer 1

If you are doing something like this:

if($session->get('user_id')==1)
{
    $prefs = get_prefs($session->get('user_id'));
    $info = get_info($session->get('user_id'));
}

then I would replace it with a since local variable

$id = $session->get('user_id');
if($id == 1)
{
    //.....
}

It increases clarity for one. It probably isn’t a big deal to call a simple function like that over and over again, but I still wouldn’t do it.

I try to reduce the number of functions I call in a single method. If you are doing something like:

$user_id = $session->get('user_id');
$name = $session->get('name');
// ... etc ...

You might just want to grab an array of all the session variables instead.

$user = $session->get_array();
echo $user['user_id'];

This reduces the function calls, and you get all the data in one fell swoop.

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Just one thing on clarity, using an array of user data is probably easier to read than to create a variable for each thing ($user_name, $user_id, etc).