NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

Kristina Anderson wrote:
> One thing that I've taken away from this (aside from feeling like an 
> idiot!) is that one reason for my introduction of these bugs is a 
> holdover from my "ASP" coding style where I name each query $query1, 
> query2, etc rather than what I see in a lot of PHP code I've inherited, 
> where each query is simply named $query, even if there are 6 or 7 of 
> them on the page.
> 
> What is the accepted best practice here?  I find it very confusing to 
> try to read code with 16 items each named $query or $result, but 
> my "ASP" style code is clearly introducing other editing issues.


I don't know if it is "best practice", but I give the query string variables 
descriptive names. Typically I use three variables for a SELECT query named 
such as
- $getcategoriesquery => that is the variable that holds the SQL query string
- $getcategoriesqueryrun => that is the variable that holds the return value 
from mysql_query()
- $getcategoriesqueryresult => this is typically an array that holds the 
currently read out row from which I would get the value to be added to the 
$categories array

I suspect this to be wasteful as PHP holds on to the variables even when I no 
longer use them within the script, but I found it to be really helpful when 
using the ....queryrun as a flag to decide if some query worked or generated a 
result when using it in an If block or such 50 lines further down. This 
verbose naming helps me a lot to figure out if the current value stored in a 
variable is plausible in regards to the variable name and the expected value.

I don't know if this is the best approach, but I am sure it is better than to 
name all queries $query or just to number them. Half a year from now nobody 
knows what the difference between $query5 and $query3 is unless the line where 
the SQL string is assigned is quickly found.

David