Caching of data in request for input() and body(), maybe others

[patrickvuarnoz]

The methods input() and body() are called from different places in the request class. One such place being get(). If a controller wants to update or create a model like in the following code ...

$flight = new Flight;
$flight->name = request()->get('name');
$flight->number = request()->get('number');
$flight->date = request()->get('date');
$flight->save();

... then the whole data from the request will get parsed, evaluated and sanitized 3 times. It would be better if the data would only be parsed once and only upon usage. Something like the following code might achieve this:

class Request {
    ...
    // Keep a cached version of the result of input()
    protected static $input = null;
    ...
    public static function input(bool $safeData = true)
    {
        // Check if input was calculated before, if yes, return it immediately
        if (static::$input) return static::$input;

        // Handling for first-time processing
        $handler = fopen('php://input', 'r');
        $data = stream_get_contents($handler);
        $contentType = Headers::get('Content-Type') ?? '';
        ...

        // Cache data
        static::$input = $safeData ? \Leaf\Anchor::sanitize($data) : $data;

        // Return
        return static::$input;
    }
}

[mychidarko]

@patrickvuarnoz that's correct, yes we can save a bit of performance by implementing a caching layer on the request, however, something like this won't work because of other systems like Swoole otherwise we risk having data crossing into subsequent requests.

We have plans for a caching layer all over Leaf, but there are a few more pressing things at the moment