An excess number of option value lookups was discovered while testing Store Locator Plus® 5.13.8 where the option/label_directions was searched multiple times for a single map render. To reduce load on servers this should only happen once, at the start of the initial map rendering.
This is not a blatant “it did something wrong” or “didn’t do something it should” type of bug. This is a performance and resource usage bug and may require some new architcture.
The manifestation:
Debugging path… investigation
Looking for label_directions in the code…
The initial search through the plugins reveals places the settings are created, set, stored, and managed but not the “JavaScript hook” being fired via /wp-json (the REST API for WordPress). So we need to look deeper.
Looking for options/ in the code…
Let’s try the start of the REST API path after the generic /wp-json/store-locator-plus/v2/ part…
We can ignore the assets/ directory… but what else is in here…
Ahhh… the slp_core.js call to slplus.rest_url + ‘options/’ + attribute looks sus…a
Solution (planned for SLP 5.14)
There was a problem in slp_core.js with value testing.
Turns out an empty value causes multiple REST calls. The following is an invalid test to see if a property exists, which is what we want here. Previously it was checking the value was SET and had a “non-falsy” value. In JavaScript lots of things are “kind of true” or “kind of false” (aka Falsy), for example the empty string “” is FALSE. That is not what we want here.
In slp_core.js we ant to replace the if (!<var>) with if (! var.hasOwnProperty()) …
Cause
The call to /v2/options/label_directions was firing once for every location because the default value for the directions label is empty (“”). This was evaluating to false, which forced the SLP JavaScript to query the server to get the value, which set it to “”.
For each location that was rendered the setting was checked… “is the label for directions set?” or more accurately “Is the label for directions set and NOT empty?”. Every time it came back saying “no, it is NOT set” or rather “It IS empty” … so the code would then go ask the REST API server for the label value.
Rinse and repeat.