Re: Best Practice

Ashley, This is difficult to answer, as you are actually the best person to decide. Consider some of the following things: 1. How often do you anticipate people will use the "printer-friendly" link? 2. How much data do you anticipate, on average, to be contained in the results of these queries? 3. How much traffic do you anticipate? 4. How much memory does your Web server have? 5. Are you maintaining sessions anyway, or would this be the only thing to require them? My (uneducated) guess would be that querying again is the best approach. You're basically talking about a separate request anyway, and the overhead of maintaining state might not be worth it, as you may end up with many of these result sets stored in the session, and the client may never use them. Happy hacking. Chris Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:

I'm working on converting several static (price) pages on our site into dynamic pages, with the data stored in an MySQL database and PHP to pull the data out, with CSS to build the page and present it. At the same time, I would also like to have a 'printer friendly' link on each page that visitors can click on and get the same page re-rendered for easy printing. What's the best way to get the data converted from one form to another? Should I be querying the database again to get the same data to reformat? Should I store the data in sessions and reformat based on the CSS? I would think having to query twice for the same thing would be a degradation in performance, right? So what's the best practice?