Development

One of the difficulties with supporting SQLite3 or PDO in fluxbb is that corresponding PHP API does not provide a way to get the number of rows in the result set without fetching all rows first. Yet fluxbb code assumes that such functionality is available and freely uses $db->num_rows() throughout the code.

However in all cases the reliance on $db->num_rows() can be eliminated.

Most of the calls to $db->num_rows() just checks if there are any row in the result. Such cases can be replaced with a new driver method has_rows() that can be implemented efficiently with SQLite3/PDO.

In other cases the code uses num_rows() as a stop condition fir loops fetching all results. This can be trivially replaced by loops that fetch results until the fetching methods return false.

The remaining cases uses num_rows($result) as the sole purpose of the result. This can be replaced by doing proper SELECT COUNT(*) calls. This may even improove the performance as the DB does not need to send the result set.

The last case is the check in moderate.php "$db->num_rows($result) < 2". But even here although convinience, num_rows is non-essentail and can be replaced by trying to fetch the 2 rows first and then fetching the rest.