read field values without loading the user objects in drupal 7

Question

If I have a known set of users eg. by UID $users = {123, 435, 5463, 5678}. And I want to read the value stored in one custom field e.g. field_current_status that has been added to their user object is there any way to read this 1 value for each of them without loading their user objects.

I don't want to load up a lot of data for a lot of users just to get 1 value from each user.

I have looked at many functions including these below;

field_get_items($entity_type, $entity, $field_name, $langcode = NULL)
field_view_field($entity_type, $entity, $field_name, $display = array(), $langcode = NULL)
field_view_value($entity_type, $entity, $field_name, $item, $display = array(), $langcode = NULL)
user_load_multiple($uids = array(), $conditions = array(), $reset = FALSE)

These all require the the user object to be loaded e.g. with user_load($uid) or in effect do the same.

Is there any Drupal way to do this or must I write a custom DB query?

GroovyCarrot GroovyCarrot · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-03T23:31:00

The standard way to do this in Drupal would be to load the users with user_load_multiple($user_uids), this saves overhead in database queries by loading all objects at the same time. You can then just loop over the users and extract the required field:

$users = user_load_multiple($user_uids);
if (!$users) {
  return FALSE;
}

foreach ($users as $user) {
  $field_current_status = field_get_items('user', $user, 'field_current_status');
  if (!$field_current_status) {
    continue;
  }

  // Handle $field_current_status.
}

In terms of memory unless you were loading a massive number of users, you shouldn't really have a problem - Drupal itself has a high demand for memory. If memory is still a concern for you then you can use db_select() or db_query() to contruct a query to join the field_current_status table with the users table.

If this is a process that need to happen often then it may be worth looking into scheduling the cron to do it chunk by chunk.

read field values without loading the user objects in drupal 7

1 Answers