CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have been playing around with creating a few custom tokens in CIVI per this blog
hxxp://civicrm.org/blogs/colemanw/create-your-own-tokens-fun-and-profit

I noticed the the value for $cids is always an array of size one when creating letters.  It seem as though the token_values routine is called multiple times for each item in the search but in each instance $cids is an array with just the current cid as the only member.  On the blog there is always a foreach loop on $cids but it seems to be that it never has more than one item.  Is this just a piece of leftover from when $cid used to be a single value or an array? 

I am trying to optimize the code and I dont want to run 500 independant update queries but it seems that is the case when it executes for letters.  The note on the blog says it updates all in one query but it actually seems to run for each item that was in the search results.

As an aside I noticed that if I send emails then all the contacts get added into the $cids and tokenvalues() is only executed one time.

It seems to me I need to program for 2 cases.  One where $cids is of size 1 and the other where its greater than one.  Does this seem to be correct?  It makes a difference when updating the database if I know that its going to be called once for each item or once for the full search set.

Thanks

When I wrote that blog I was hopeful that this optimization would happen someday (I still am). The hook is forward-thinking in supplying contacts as an array, and your hook implementation should be as well so that a future optimization doesn't break your code.