NYCPHP Meetup

[Jeff Rigby]

Hello, my name is Jeff Rigby, this is my first time posting and I'm 
very interested in getting involved with this list.

I wanted to get some advice on the best and most efficient way to store 
user controlled configurations. I am currently storing all non-security 
risk configurations in a MySQL table named 'config'. When the user logs 
in I run a query to get all the configs from the table and then I store 
them in a session variable with the following function:


// Set $force to 1 if configurations needs to be reloaded.
function getConfig($force) {
     if($force==1 || $_SESSION['config_set']!=1) {
         $db = connectDB();
         $query = 'SELECT * FROM config';
         $results = $db->query($query);
         while($row = $results->fetchRow(DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC)) {
             $_SESSION['config_'.$row['config_name']] = 
$row['config_value'];
         }
         $_SESSION['config_set'] = 1;
         $db->disconnect();
     }
}

This way, unless I update a configuration, I only need to to query the 
SQL table once per a session. It seems to work fine.

My questions are:
1. Would it be better to query the table on every page load?
2. What are the drawbacks if any of using session vars to store configs?
3. Is there a better method?
4. Is it proper to call session vars from within a function, or should 
the the session vars be passed to the variable when the function is 
called?

Example
function test() {
     RETURN 'Hello '.$_SESSION['config_name'].'!';
}

test();

or

function test($name) {
     RETURN 'Hello '.$name.'!';
}

test($_SESSION['config_name']);

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Jeff