rackspace cloudfiles api - most efficient method to return container files

Question

Using the Rackspace CloudFiles API (in PHP), there are times when I need to get just a list of the all the current files in the container. What I just came up with is terribly slow and in-efficient because it gets every object pertaining to that file. So what I have:

My Function

function clean_cdn() {
    $objects = $this->CI->cfiles->get_objects();
    foreach ($objects as $object) {
        echo $object->name;
    }
}

get_objects wrapper for CodeIgniter

public function get_objects() {
    $my_container = $this->container_info();

    try {
        return $my_container->get_objects(0, NULL, NULL, NULL);
    } catch(Exception $e) {
        $this->_handle_error($e);
        return FALSE;
    }
}

cloudfiles get_objects function

function get_objects($limit=0, $marker=NULL, $prefix=NULL, $path=NULL)
{
    list($status, $reason, $obj_array) =
        $this->cfs_http->get_objects($this->name, $limit,
            $marker, $prefix, $path);

    if ($status < 200 || $status > 299) {
        throw new InvalidResponseException(
            "Invalid response (".$status."): ".$this->cfs_http->get_error());
    }

    $objects = array();
    foreach ($obj_array as $obj) {
        $tmp = new CF_Object($this, $obj["name"], False, True);
        $tmp->content_type = $obj["content_type"];
        $tmp->content_length = (float) $obj["bytes"];
        $tmp->set_etag($obj["hash"]);
        $tmp->last_modified = $obj["last_modified"];
        $objects[] = $tmp;
    }
    return $objects;
}

This will give me just the name (which is all I need for what I'm doing currently) but is there a better way?

Update

I noticed that I could technically just put all the "directories" in an array and iterate over them in a foreach loop, listing each of them as the 4th parameter of get_objects. So get_objects(0, NULL, NULL, 'css'), etc. Still seems like there's a better way though.

Answer 1

If you are using the old php-cloudfiles bindings, use the list_objects() method. This will just return a list of the objects in the container.

php-cloudfiles bindings are deprecated now, the new official php cloudfiles bindings are php-opencloud (object-store) and you can find the section on listing objects in a container here

Answer 2

Using php-opencloud, if you have a Container object, use the ObjectList() method to return a list of objects:

   $list = $container->ObjectList();
   while ($obj = $list->Next()) {
      // do stuff with $obj
   }

The $obj has all of the metadata associated with the object that's returned by the list (which is to say, there are certain attributes that can only be retrieved by invoking the object directly, but this should have most of what you need).