A PHP data object, or

PDO, is an extension that allows us to have a consistent way of interfacing with

databases, making our communication much easier from within our project.

The first step in working with our data is to use a database-specific PDO driver.

Before we create our PDO and

connect to our database, we should do a quick review of some object-oriented PHP.

Since our PDO and all that it returns is in OOP form, our object or

our PDO PHP data object is an instant of the PDO class.

That object it will have its own variables called properties, and

its own built in functions or methods.

To start with,

we're gonna need to connect to our database using a PDO database driver.

We'll be using SQLite for

the following example, so let's see what's needed for that database.

So we'll do that by opening up a tab, and doing a search for PDO drivers.

[SOUND] Okay, and the first one is the one we want.

And then we can see here we have several different PDO drivers.

You'll see it says database extensions here at the top,

abstraction layers and PDO.

If you end up on just the PDO main page, you can scroll down, and you'll see that

the very bottom, or pretty close to the bottom here, you'll see PDO drivers.

So that's where we left off.

So in PDO drivers, we're gonna want SQLite, so we click SQLite.

Let's see what it requires.

Says PDO SQLite driver that implements the PHP data objects interface,

which we'll be working with, to enable access to SQLite 3 databases.

In order to do that, we're going to need a certain string.

Let's see here.

We need a PDO DSN, okay?

So we will need the data source name, or

DSN, which is the prefix, which is going to be SQLite.

And we can see more info here, and to access a database on disc,

which is what we have, we would append the absolute path to the DSN prefix.

Okay, so taking all that in, let's go make it work.

Head back over to your workspaces.

You can leave this open.

I'm gonna go ahead and close it.

And now, I'm gonna go ahead and bring my console down.

If it's still there, you can just tuck it away.

Or if you want, you can do Hide Console.

I'm gonna open up my index.php file, scroll to the very top, and

here I'm gonna open up some standard PHP tags, and

we'll add our connection code to start with, here in the index file.

Go ahead and close it.

And inside here, we're gonna wanna do a couple of things.

The very first thing that we're gonna wanna do,

is to enable our error reporting.

And to do that, we're going to first add a comment, and that comment is

gonna remind us to get rid of this code before we put it in production, because we

don't wanna display errors to just any user, it's just for development purposes.

So I'm gonna say remove before flight.

Okay, in the next line of code, we're going to call a built-in PHP

function called ini_set, so ini_set.

And then in here, we're gonna have two different strings.

The first string is what we wanna set, which is display_errors.

And that is display_errors.

And then we're gonna put another string, which is what we wanted on or off.

And in our case, we want it on.

Close our line with a semicolon and that's our very first step that we

have error reporting or displaying errors to our screen on.

The next thing we're gonna do is create our PDO object.

We do that through object oriented code by instantiating a new PDO object.

So, first we give it a variable name to store the object in, so

$ and I'll go with DB for database.

The next is the keyword new to create a new object.

And then our class, which is capital P-D-O, and then open and

close parenthesis and close our line.

So inside of our PDO, the first thing that happens is we need a DSN.

And for us, if we recall, it was SQLite,

followed by a colon, followed by the absolute path of the database on disk.

So, head back a couple, open up some strings, and then we're gonna do sqlite:,

in our case, it's in the same folder, so

we're gonna do ./ and then database.db.

Okay. We're gonna save that,

go down to the next line, and just to see that we've created our new object,

we're gonna do a var dump for the actual DB object that we created.

So let's do that now.

Var_dump, open and close our parentheses,

and then inside our object $db, close our line with a semi colon, hit Save.

I'm gonna go ahead and hit die after this.

That will stop the actual rest of the file from loading, hit Save and

then click on our Preview icon.

Okay, so here we are seeing it's dumping a object.

It is a PDO object.

If we were maybe to, perhaps, make a mistake, maybe a spelling error.

So let's add a couple extra's As in here.

Save our file, and then re-hit the icon.

You might get this, which is a fatal error, uncaught exception, and

then PDO exception.

Well, we don't want uncaught exceptions, we don't want that accidentally happening,

so the next thing for us to do is a little bit of error handling.

But before we do the error handling, let me go ahead and fix my error.

So I'm gonna go in close this and remove some of these As.

Save and then re-preview.

All right, great.

Now let's move on to some air handling.