Page 432 - Beginning PHP 5.3

Part III: Using PHP in Practice
Finally, the method closes the database connection, then returns the data to the calling code in the form
of a two - element array. The first element contains the array of Member objects, and the second element
contains the calculated total number of rows:

return array( $members, $row[“totalRows”] );

Of course, after the try block comes the corresponding catch block. This simply closes the connection
and uses PHP ’ s die() function to abort the script with an error message.

The next method, getMember() , works in a similar fashion to getMembers() . It retrieves a single record
from the members table, as a Member object. The ID of the record to retrieve is specified by the argument
passed to the method.

This method creates a prepared statement, much like getMembers() did, to retrieve the record:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM “ . TBL_MEMBERS . “ WHERE id = :id”;

Next, the $id parameter ’ s value is bound to the :id placeholder, and the query is run:

$st- > bindValue( “:id”, $id, PDO::PARAM_INT );

$st- > execute();
If the query returned a row, it is retrieved using the PDOStatement::fetch() method, which retrieves
a single row from the result set as an associative array of field names and values. This associative array is
then passed to the Member constructor to create and populate a Member object, which is then returned to
the calling code after closing the connection:

$row = $st- > fetch();
parent::disconnect( $conn );

if ( $row ) return new Member( $row );
The final two convenience methods are used to return the Member object ’ s gender and favoriteGenre
fields as human - friendly strings, ideal for displaying in a Web page. getGenderString() simply
returns “ Female ” if gender is set to “ f ” , and “ Male ” otherwise. getFavoriteGenreString() looks up
the field value in the $_genres array property created at the start of the class in order to return a
human - readable form of the value.

Building the LogEntry Class
The LogEntry class is another data class, much like Member , although it ’ s a fair bit simpler. It retrieves
rows of data from the accessLog table.

Save the following script as LogEntry.class.php in the book_club folder:
< ?php

require_once “DataObject.class.php”;

class LogEntry extends DataObject {

protected $data = array(

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