Excessive Constants

per1os · April 20, 2007

Hey all,

Designing a new system I am looking into a "template" system as to say that is relatively easy to modify etc. What I came up with was to use a constant variable to house the template information for a specific area. I am curious if this is frowned upon or not. Currently here is what it would look like:

<?php
define('TEMPLATE_EXTRA', 'This is a template %REPLACE_VAR% !!!');

$replace['REPLACE_VAR'] = "awesome";
$template = replaceTemplateVar(TEMPLATE_EXTRA, $replace);

print $template;

function replaceTemplateVar($template, $replace) {
       foreach ($replace as $what => $with) 
              $template = str_replace("%" . $what . "%", $with, $template);
       return $template;
}
?>

Pretty laid back and basic. The issue that I am not sure about is there could potentially be 25-50 different templates defined as a constant every time the page is loaded.

I am not sure if that is a problem or not. Looking for some insight to the situation of having alot of constants defined with some having potentially a lot of text.

Thanks.

Note: There is no issue with the code.

utexas_pjm · April 20, 2007

I don't like the idea of template engines like smarty where you ask PHP to parse template code, using str_replace or regex or whatever. In my opinion that is inefficient and you're building a scripting language within a scripting language. I prefer an approach like this, where you use PHP as the template language.

<?php

class TemplatePage
{
function process()
{}

function registerVar($name, $value)
{
	$this->$name = $value;	
}

function renderTemplate($tpl)
{
	require($tpl);
}
}

class SomeTemplatePage extends TemplatePage
{
function process()
{
	$this->registerVar('replace_var', 'awesome');
	$this->registerVar('some_array', array(1,2,3,4,5));
	$this->renderTemplate('test.tpl.php');


}
}

$c = new SomeTemplatePage();
$c->process();

?>

test.tpl.php

<html>
<body>
This is a template <?php echo $this->replace_var ?> !!!
<?php
foreach($this->some_array as $num) {
echo $num . '<br />';

}?>
</body>
</html>

Best,

Patrick

per1os · April 20, 2007

Yea, thats not a bad idea, but I do not like the file portion. I like to keep everything in a database. I know I could do it this way and use eval, but the reason I am coding it in such a way is for my designer, he does not know php but can work with a scheme I create.

But I may use that code in other scripts that I create.

I think I will try and test the constant issue I am describing, and see if the server load changes at all, but what I will probably end up doing is store these in the DB and make a function that grabs the template and than parses it.

I will post any new information I find out regarding constants.

per1os · April 20, 2007

Well I created a function to test the use of 500 constants that were created "on the fly". My results were as follows:

It took 0.004493 seconds to create 500 constants and print 3 out.

The code used is here:

<?php
$start = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<500;$i++) {
define('CONSTANT' . $i, 'This is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string testively long string testThis is a relatively long string testThis is a relatively long string test');
}

echo CONSTANT255 . "<br />";
echo CONSTANT450 . "<br />";
echo CONSTANT0 . "<br />";

$end = microtime(true);
$total = ($end - $start);
print '<br /><br />It took ' . $total . ' seconds to create 500 constants and print 3 out.';
?>

As far as I can tell the processing time will not be a huge difference, but what about server memory?

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