Question

On my website, I have user accounts that are configurable with forms that allow users to update everything from first and last names to privacy settings. I use the following function to update the database with that input. (Note that the following code uses WordPress-specific features.)

function update_account() {
    global $current_user; get_currentuserinfo();
    require_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/registration.php' );

    $uid = $current_user->ID;

    // First Name
    if(isset($_POST['first_name']) && $_POST['first_name'] <> $current_user->first_name) {
        wp_update_user( array( 
            'ID' => $uid, 'first_name' => esc_attr($_POST['first_name'])
        ));
    }

    // ...and so on 43 more times...

}

This feels like the wrong way to process forms. This also looks like it will negatively impact server performance when there are multiple users and frequent updates, given that the if-then-else conditions for every field, even fields not on a particular page, force checking each field for input.

Moreover, since form data can be expected to remain relatively constant, I added the <> operator to prevent the function from updating fields where there has not been any change, but I suspect this also means that every field is still evaluated for change. To make matters worse, adding new fields — there are already 44 fields in total — is an unwieldy process.

What’s a better way to process form data?

Answer 1

Keep an array of the fields you will be processing with this code, and iterate over it. This works if all your attributes are strings, for example. If you have different data types such as boolean flags to handle differently from the strings, you may wish to group them into their own array.

// All the fields you wish to process are in this array
$fields = array('first_name', 'last_name', 'others',...'others99');

// Loop over the array and process each field with the same block
foreach ($fields as $field) {
    if(isset($_POST[$field]) && $_POST[$field] != $current_user->{$field}) {
        wp_update_user( array( 
            'ID' => $uid, $field => esc_attr($_POST[$field])
        ));
    }
}