如何有效地分页PHP数组？

Question

I have an array currently paginated by using URL parameters (eg. ....php?page=2&blah=blop&glob=gloo).

At the moment, every single time the page loads, an XML file is being downloaded from a query engine, parsed and then im pulling an array of objects out I want to use.

How do I set this up so that I don't have to reload the page and only have to read from the XML file once?

I am fairly new to PHP so please bear with me. After a bit of researching I did I think Ajax is appropriate for this? Please correct me if I am wrong. I tried to find out some stuff on paginating with Ajax but the most useful things I found were for paginating data from a mysql database, not for an array of objects.

Can anyone provide any pointers? I'm eager to learn.

Answer 1

When I need this, I create a caching function that either A) Loads the XML from the original source and then saves it to a cache folder, or B) Loads it from the cache folder if it exists, and other criteria (like freshness) is met.

On one site that had to retrieve data from a fairly slow server, I put A) into a cron job and always read from the cache for the website.

If you need large data pagination, here's a good example: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-paginate-data-with-php/