Learning PHP Data Objects

Table of Contents

Learning PHP Data Objects

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

Preface

What This Book Covers

Who This Book is For

Conventions

Reader Feedback

Customer Support

Downloading the Example Code for the Book

Errata

Questions

1. Introduction

Using PDO

Connecting to the Database

Connection Strings

Issuing SQL Queries, Quoting Parameters, and Handling Result Sets

Error Handling

Prepared Statements

Appropriate Understanding of PDO

Summary

2. Using PHP Data Objects: First Steps

Connection Strings

Creating the Sample Database

The Data Model

Creating the MySQL Database

Designing Our Code

PDO Statements and Result Sets

Retrieving Result Set Metadata

Summary

3. Error Handling

Sources of Errors

Server Software Failure or Overload

Improper Configuration of the Application

Improper Validation of User Input

Inserting a Record with a Duplicate Primary Key or Unique Index Value

Syntax Errors in SQL Statements

Types of Error Handling in PDO

Defining an Error Handling Function

Creating the Edit Book Page

Creating the Edit Author Page

Securing against Uncaught Exceptions

Summary

4. Prepared Statements

Prepared Statements

Positional and Named Placeholders

Prepared Statements and Bound Values

Working with BLOBs

Summary

5. Handling Rowsets

Retrieving the Number of Rows in a Result Set

Limiting the Number of Rows Returned

Using Database-Specific SQL

Processing the Top N Rows Only

Starting at an Arbitrary Offset

Summary

6. Advanced PDO Usage

Setting and Getting Connection Attributes

MySQL Buffered Queries

Connecting Using the Connection Configuration File and php.ini Setting

Getting the List of Available Drivers

Transactions

Summary

7. An Advanced Example

Designing the Model

Modifying the Frontend to Use the Model

Advantages of Separating the Model

Further Thoughts

Finishing Up

A. Introduction to OOP in PHP5

What is Object-Oriented Programming?

The Syntax for Declaring Objects

Constructors

Destructors

The Advantages of OOP

Inheritance

Encapsulation

Polymorphism

Static Properties, Methods, and Class Constants

Exceptions

Summary

Index

Learning PHP Data Objects

Dennis Popel

Learning PHP Data Objects

Copyright © 2007 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: September 2007

Production Reference: 2310807

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

32 Lincoln Road

Olton

Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.

ISBN 978-1-847192-66-0

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Derek Heasley (<the_matrix@eircom.net>)

Credits

Author

Dennis Popel

Reviewers

Dinangkur Kundu

Tahmid Munaz

Acquisition Editors

Nanda Padmanabhan

Viraj Joshi

Development Editor

Rashmi Phadnis

Technical Editor

Swapna.V.Verlekar

Project Manager

Abhijeet Deobhakta

Editorial Manager

Dipali Chittar

Project Coordinator

Zenab Ismail Kapasi

Indexer

Bhushan Pangaonkar

Proofreaders

Martin Brooks

Chris Smith

Production Coordinators

Shantanu Zagade

Manjiri Nadkarni

Cover Designer

Shantanu Zagade

About the Author

Dennis Popel is an experienced PHP/PHP 5 developer currently working for an Australian web development company, Motive Media (www.motivemedia.com.au). Serving Sun Microsystems Australia, Luna Park Sydney, Alsco Holdings, and Pine Solutions, among others, Dennis leads company development of proprietary, web-based, software solutions. In his spare time, he runs the www.onphp5.com blog and works on an online RSS aggregator newzmix.com.

Dennis Popel has been developing with PHP for more than 5 years and is experienced in such fields as object-oriented design and MVC. Previously he has worked at Rapid Intelligence, another Australian-based web company, publisher of such popular titles as NationMaster.com, FactBites.com, and Qwika.com. In the past, Dennis was developing proprietary Java applications.

This book is devoted to all the people who introduced and guided me in this wonderful world of information technology.

About the Reviewers

Dinangkur Kundu completed his bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Central Queensland University, Australia. He has been working as a software engineer and network admin—designing, developing, and configuring. He has worked with a variety of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation languages. He has worked with flat files, indexed files, hierarchical databases, network databases, and relational databases, several Sun and HP servers to configure small and medium range office networks providing Internet service, Mail service, file share service, network-based printing service, backup service, and implementing several network-based applications. Currently, he works as Chief Technical Officer at Quantumcloud, developing and customizing LAMP- and WAMP-based web services. He enjoys producing high-quality software, web-based solutions, and designing secure network.

I would like to thank my family for supporting and inspiring my ongoing passion for software development and the resultant challenges of life near the bleeding edge. I would also like to thank Mr. Jamil and Mr. Hasin, my close professional mentors and who to this day remain close friends. You can contact me at <dkundu@gmail.com>

Tahmid Munaz is currently working in Relisource Technologies (www.relisource.com) as an SQA Engineer. He is also a volunteer in an association called SQABD (SQA Bangladesh—www.sqabd.com) as a Community Relations Manager. He has experience in conducting QA and Testing training and mentoring freshers for Testing and QA Career paths and Consulting.

He loves to keep in touch with other Technical Communities like—JPGroup, Dot_net_community, PHPExpert, and PHPResource. He is addicted to reading blogs and writing when he gets time. You can visit Tahmid's blog at http://tahmidmunaz.blogspot.com

I would like to thank Hasin, the author of Wordpress Complete, who always inspired me. Thanks to my friend Mizan, the author of MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide, who helped me in my reviewing as it was first time for me. Thanks to the Packt team for giving me the support for this startup, especially to Viraj, Rashmi, and Abhijeet. I really enjoyed reviewing and hope to do better in future. I had heard about the author of this book but had no chance to work together. It was a chance for me to work with him and feel proud to help him make a nice book. I would like to thank my Program Managers who have always helped me to do and learn in better ways: Sahadatul Hakim (Enosis Solutions).

Preface

This book will introduce you to one of the most important extensions to PHP that are available, starting with PHP version 5.0—the PHP Data Objects, commonly known as PDO.

PHP grew in to a very popular web programming language due to its simplicity and ease of use. One of the key factors of this growing success is the built-in possibility to access many popular relational database management systems (RDBMS), such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, to name just a few. Today, most of the existing and newly created web applications interconnect with these databases to produce dynamic, data-driven websites.

While most PHP-enabled web servers are still running PHP versions prior to 5.0, the enhancements and performance improvements introduced with this new version will lead to wide acceptance of PHP 5 at all levels during coming years. This imposes the need to start familiarizing ourselves with all the advanced features available in this version today.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 gives an overview of PDO along with a few features likes single interface for creating a connection, connection strings, uniform statement methods, and use of exceptions and a singe system of error codes.

Chapter 2 helps to get you started with PDO, by creating a sample database and then by creating a connection object. It also introduces PDOStatement classes.

Chapter 3 deals with various error-handling processes and their uses.

Chapter 4 introduces prepared statements. It deals with using prepared statements without binding values, binding a variable, and binding a parameter to a prepared statement. We also take a look at how to work with BLOBs using streams so that we do not risk query failures.

Chapter 5 helps us determine the number of rows in the returned result set. Also, we come across a new concept—scrollable cursors, which allow us to fetch subsets of rows from a result set.

Chapter 6 talks about advanced uses of PDO and includes setting connection parameters, transactions, and methods of PDO and the PDOStatement class.

Chapter 7 gives an example, where creation of the method part of an MVC application is discussed.

Appendix A explains the object-oriented features like inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and exception handling.

Who This Book is For

This book is targeted at PHP programmers, who are considering migrating to PHP 5 and using the new database connection abstraction library, PHP Data Objects. While PDO is fully object oriented, the familiarity with this programming paradigm is required. Novice users who are not familiar with PHP 5's object-oriented features may consider reading Appendix A first so that they can follow the code examples in this book.

We assume that the reader is familiar with SQL, at the level of creating tables and making simple SELECT queries as well as updates. Our examples are based on MySQL and SQLite databases as these are the most used options and the only ones available at most cheap hosting providers.

At the end of this book we will present a more advanced example which may be of interest to expert programmers with deeper knowledge of SQL and programming concepts.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: PostgreSQL users might have already used pg_prepare() and pg_execute() pair.

A block of code will be set as follows:

// Assume we also want to filter by make

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM cars WHERE make=?';

$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);

$stmt->execute(array($_REQUEST['make']));

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

// Assume we also want to filter by make

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM cars WHERE make=?';

$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);

$stmt->execute(array($_REQUEST['make']));

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: You can simply click on the Authors link located on the books listing page in your browser .

Note

Important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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