Welcome to the Project for the New American Century

The New American Century eh? Apparently this site has been around for a while, but I never stumbled across it before.. I really don’t think it requires further comment.

…is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world

Caching Smarty Database Templates

The Smarty manual explains how to use Templates from other sources such as databases. It doesn’t however give an example of caching templates from these sources. I ran into a spot of trouble when I tried to be clever about checking the freshness of a db based template.
I didn’t want to interogate the db on every request just to check if a template is stale or not. Why have caching when you have to hit the db anyway? The db_get_timestamp() function has to be modified to check the freshness in some other way then.
I used a 0-byte file in a web-server writeable directory. Unfortunately it didn’t work. The is_cached() function would return false and I’d assign Smarty variables to prepare a new version of the web page, but when I called the display() function it displayed the last cached version!
It took me a while to figure out that both is_cached() and display() call the db_get_timestamp() function. As the file I used to flag a refresh was deleted on the first run I had to retain the timestamp somehow. That’s where the global $filetimestamp array comes in.

  1. is_cached() checks the freshness of the cache and returns false.
  2. I prepare the new Smarty variables.
  3. The page is displayed using the Smarty display() function
  4. Use touch scratch/index.tpl to update the template cache.
function db_get_timestamp($tpl_name, &$tpl_timestamp, &$smarty_obj)
{
  global $filetimestamp;

  if( is_file( 'scratch/' . $tpl_name ) == false )
  {
    if( $filetimestamp[ $tpl_name ] != '' )
    {
      $tpl_timestamp = $filetimestamp[ $tpl_name ];
    }
    else
    {
      $tpl_timestamp = mktime (0,0,0,date("m")-1,date("d"), date("Y"));
    }
    return true;
  }
  else
  {
    $tpl_timestamp = filemtime( 'scratch/' . $tpl_name );
    $filetimestamp[ $tpl_name ] = $tpl_timestamp;
    unlink( 'scratch/' . $tpl_name );
  }
  return true;
}
if( $smarty->is_cached( 'db:index.tpl' ) == false )
{
  print "regenerating cache!<br>";
  $smarty->assign( 'date', time() );
}

$smarty->display("db:index.tpl");