I am using CodeIgniter but this question applies in a general sense too.
I have a table of transactions with columns
item_name | type | date | price | document
I want to do the following in two completely independent cases.
1) Get a list of transactions within a certain date range. 2) Get the total price of each transaction.type within a certain date range.
The former can be achieved by simply using a select statement with > datetimestamp
The latter can be achieved by selecting the SUM, and grouping by the type whilst like implementing any required where conditionals e.g with > datetimestamp
Although a simple case, to achieve this I need to have two methods however the bulk of both of these methods (namely the WHERE clauses) are duplicated across both methods.
In terms of speed etc it does not matter but it seems like pointless code reproduction.
A second example is as follows.
I previously had a method get_data($ID) which would get a row from a table based on the ID passed in.
As such in a separate method I would get my 100 items for example.. return an array, loop through them and call get_data for each.
This setup meant that many different methods could get different lists from different sources and then still use the same get_data function and a loop to get the required data.
This minimized code duplication but was incredibly ineffiecient as it meant looping through loads of data items and hundreds of db queries.
In my current setup i just join the data table in each of my methods - code duplication but clear improved efficiency.
A final example is as follows
In codeigniter I can have a function such as the following:
get_thing($ID)
{
$this->load->database();
$this->db->where('ID',$ID);
$this->db->get('table');
}
BUT in alternate situations i might want to only get items in a specific folder.. as such making the function more generic works better.. e.g.
get_thing($array)
{
$this->load->database();
$this->db->where($array);
$this->db->get('table');
}
but then I might want to use this function in two different contexts e.g a user page and an admin page whereby admins can see all items, even unverified ones. My code now becomes:
get_thing($array,$show_unverified = false)
{
$this->load->database();
$this->db->where($array);
if($show_unverified == false)
{
$this->db->where('verified','YES');
}
$this->db->get('table');
}
As you can probably see this can quickly get out of hand and methods can become overly complex, confusing and full of conditionals.
My question is as follows - What are best practices for minimizing code duplication, and how could they be applied to the above situations? I spent hours and hours trying to make my code more efficient yet I'm getting nowhere because I cant workout what I should really be trying to achieve.
Cheers
