CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Just as in drupal you have access to the $user object, is there or can we have a user object for the currently logged in user. That way it can be cached and things like membership info can be stored and easily retrieved without db access too much. The amount of times I have had to query the db for membership is excessive I think.

I suggest using the Proxy design pattern to act as a gateway between a Singleton user object which can retrieve the cached data from the session and load it lazily into the user object.

I might even write this myself as it would make my custom code much quicker.

I think if we do it right it will not have too much impact on processing time. Only when things are requested from the proxy do we get the data from the db. This means that when it is stored in the session, we check the user object for the value first. If not in the user object we then check the session and failing that we get from db.

Thinking about it though, this could even be extended as a way to access contact info in general. A potential way of allowing devs to get the data they need without trawling through the core files. I'm getting all excited about this.

Logged in user could be cached in session but the proxy for other users could be discarded each cycle.

Things that can be fetched/cached:
membership
contact info (basic)
email-primary
last login (not needed for logged in user but might be useful for other contacts)
maybe waiting list info
last contacted (part of activities)

I know it's easy to get carried away but I see no reason why not to. Also if it is a nice system it should be easy to extend the proxy and the user object to fetch more. It would make it easier for contrib devs too. If need be, the proxy and the user object could be extended by using the decorator pattern which means functionality could be bolted together to get whatever is needed.

Perhaps something of this sort could be extended into a new api system. I know the api has a lot to do with the rest api too but if the api and the core code are all using the same thing then nothing gets left behind.

Opinions and corrections always welcome of course.