Implementing Search and Filter in WordPress

Any such plugins are assuming you are using WP as a conventional CMS and the search will be through post data. To work with that schema, you’d have to parse the fetched data into posts and post meta. I agree that that is not a good approach for volatile data, but it means conventional plugins are not going to work with your better approach.

If the data remains the same all day, you’d want to cache the data somehow to avoid needing to make repeated API requests just to get the same data. I don’t know what sort of data schema is involved, nor the volume of data, but my inclination would be to parse the data into a custom table that’s structured to optimally fit the API’s data schema. Its data can be refreshed as new data becomes available. Then you can use mySQL to help you with search and filter functionality. Yes, this means coding from scratch. You’re mainly looking at code to parse API data into a DB table, then composing appropriate mySQL to get search and filter results. It may not be all that onerous a task, but it’s certainly not trivial either.

Hi thanks for the reply The JSON data has about 500-600 rows with 62 columns . I did not think about storing the data in the database and using SQL queries for the search and filter. I was thinking of doing the search and filter in my code itself . Unfortunately , the data from the API needs to be fetched each time a user visits the page ( properties can be sold /added at any instant ) . If this is the case would it be better :

1. To store the data in the database and use SQL queries or create custom posts and parse the data and store it in custom posts or would it be better to implement the search and filter functionality in my code itself ?

2. Either way do I need to keep a track of which users data is stored in which row in the database / custom post by using may be a cookie value in the database/custom post ?

3. Do I need a cron job later to delete all the rows / custom posts for a particular user ?

If the API data is unique to each user, my inclination would be to try to keep it in memory and avoid writing it anywhere. I imagine most of those fields are fairly short. Any idea what the total byte size would be? 2-3 MB maybe? That should be manageable in memory. Parse the JSON into a PHP array and use PHP functions to extract out what should be output to the user. If the data needs to persist between requests, it could be kept as session data. I’m unsure of size limits for session data.

If for some reason you do need to write to the DB, do use SQL to manipulate the data. It’s much faster than PHP. However, writing to a DB is very slow. Once it’s there, SQL is fast.

I don’t think each row of data is unique to a user, is it? If relates to real estate property, data for 123 maple way is the same regardless of the user, right? Maybe what data is retrieved is unique, but once it’s in the DB I’d think the data could be aggregated. That said, there needs to be a way to flush out stale data without impacting a current user’s data. A user field for each row might facilitate that, or maybe better yet, a timestamp. The flush routine could then drop all rows older than some reasonable time period. A cron job could do this, though I think flushing stale data before writing new data would be good enough.

Thanks , this is of great help . The results are indeed not unique . I have started coding this .