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php-cachedcall

A simple PHP trait that makes it easy to cache class method call results within a single session.

Good for:

• Caching class method calls. Uses class private properties for caching.
• A trait that is easy to apply to your own classes.
• Simple and short - you can read and understand the source code in just a couple of minutes, so no need to buy a pig in a sack. :)

Not good for:

• Can't be used to store the cache to persist between sessions. After your program completes, the cache will be gone.
• Not meaningful to use for caching functions outside of classes due to the trait based design. But this can be improved later if needed.

Installation

Use composer:

Then somewhere in your php application include the autoloader:

Usage

Say you have a class Page like this:

So we have two methods (plus a contructor) and we would like to cache both of them in order to avoid rerunning code if the methods get called multiple times with same parameters. Our code transforms to this:

getPageFromDB() is a static method that takes $id as a parameter. renderContent() method is non-static. When caching a non-static method, you should call $this->cached_call() method, where as in static methods you should call self::cached_static_call() method (or static::cached_static_call()). Remember to add the _static_ word in between when needed!

Both cached_call() and cached_static_call() have a similar set of parameters:

• string $method_name: Name of the method from which you call cached_call()/cached_static_call(). You can use __METHOD__. Part of the cache key.
• array $parameters: Any parameters you want to pass to $call function. Will also be part of the cache key. Use func_get_args() if you don't need to alter the parameters in any way.
• callable $call: A function that will be called if no cache with a matching $method_name+$parameters cache key was found.

Limitations regarding $parameters

Please note that the $parameters can only contain:

• scalar values: numbers, strings, booleans.
• objects that do have a recognisable identifier field: $ID, $id, $Id or $iD

The following are not accepted:

• arrays
• objects without a recognised id property
• resources
• anything that I have forgotten to list here

This limitation is in place because generating a cache key needs to be a fast process and it's hard to define a reliable cache key for i.e. a big array whose content can change between method calls. Also object support is quite limited because an object needs to have an id property. id() or getId() methods are not supported. All limitations can be improved later if better cache key generating ways come to mind.

To overcome some of the limitations, you can for example bypass an array parameter like this:

Note that we avoided passing $an_array to cached_call(), but we passed it to our closure function with the use ($an_array) statement! So we are able to use the array in it's original form.

Temporarily disabling the cache

If you need to quickly test your class without caching, you can alter the following properties:

Contributing

Ideas, bug reports and pull requests of fixes and new features are all welcome :).

Author

Jarkko Linnanvirta