PDO bindParam into one statement? - php

Question

Is there a way I can put these bindParam statements into one statement?
$q = $dbc -> prepare("INSERT INTO accounts (username, email, password) VALUES (:username, :email, :password)");
$q -> bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$q -> bindParam(':email', $_POST['email']);
$q -> bindParam(':password', $_POST['password']);
$q -> execute();
I was using mysqli prepared before where it was possible, I switched to PDO for assoc_array support. On the php.net website for PDO it shows them on seperate lines, and in all examples I have seen it is on seperate lines.
Is it possible?

Answer 1

Example 2 on the execute page is what you want:
$sth->execute(array(':calories' => $calories, ':colour' => $colour));
You may want to look at the other examples too. With question mark parameters, it would be:
$q = $dbc -> prepare("INSERT INTO accounts (username, email, password) VALUES (?, ?, ?)");
$q->execute(array($_POST['username'], $_POST['email'], $_POST['password']));
If those are the only columns, you can just write:
$q = $dbc -> prepare("INSERT INTO accounts VALUES (?, ?, ?)");
$q->execute(array($_POST['username'], $_POST['email'], $_POST['password']));

Answer 2

helper function is a function that makes you help to avoid writing bunch of repetitive code every time you want to run a query.
This is called "programming" and there is almost none of it on this site, at least under "PHP" tag.
While many peiople thinks that programming stands for copy/pasting chunks of code from manual examples, it's somewhat different.
Although it's hard to learn but really worth it, especially if you're devoting yourself to web-developing.
As you can see, no accepted answer did no real help for you, as you still have to write something like
$sth->execute(array(':username' => $_POST['username'],
':email' => $_POST['email']
':password' => $_POST['password']);
as many times as many fields in your table, which makes not much difference from your initial approach, still makes you write each field name FOUR times.
But being a programmer, you can use powers of programming. A loop, for example - one of cornerstone programming operators.
Every time you see repetitions, you know there should be a loop.
for example, you can set up a list of fields, naming them only once.
And let a program do the rest.
Say, such a function like this one
function pdoSet($fields, &$values, $source = array()) {
$set = '';
$values = array();
if (!$source) $source = &$_POST;
foreach ($fields as $field) {
if (isset($source[$field])) {
$set.="`$field`=:$field, ";
$values[$field] = $source[$field];
}
}
return substr($set, 0, -2);
}
being given an array of field names, it can produce both insert statement and data array for you. Programmatically. So, your code become no more than these 3 short lines:
$fields = array('username', 'email', 'password');
$stmt = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO accounts SET ".pdoSet($fields,$values));
$stmt->execute($values);

Answer 3

Your Common Sense is totally right that the aim of coding is to save typing... but his solution doesn't help with the BindParams bit. I couldn't find anything else about this online, so here's something I finally just persuaded to work - I hope it's useful for someone!
//First, a function to add the colon for each field value.
function PrepareString($array){
//takes array (title,author);
//and returns the middle bit of pdo update query :title,:author etc
foreach($array as $k =>$v){
$array[$k]=':'.$v;
}
return implode(', ', $array);
}
Then...
function PdoInsert($table_name,$array){
$db = new PDO(); //however you create your own pdo
//get $fields and $vals for statement
$fields_vals=array_keys($array);
$fields=implode(',',$fields_vals);
$vals=PrepareString($fields_vals);
$sql = "INSERT INTO $table_name($fields) VALUES ($vals)";
$qwe=$db->prepare($sql);
foreach ($array as $k =>$v ){
//add the colon to the key
$y=':'.$k;
//god knows why it doesn't like $qwe->bindParam($y,$v,PDO::PARAM_STR);
// but it really doesn't! So we refer back to $array.
//add checks for different binding types here
(see PDO::PARAM_INT is important in bindParam?)
$qwe->bindParam($y,$array[$k],PDO::PARAM_STR);
}
if ($qwe->execute()==true){
return $db->lastInsertId();
}
else {
return $db->errorCode();
}
}
Then you can insert anything by doing
PdoInsert('MyTableName',array('field1'=>$value1,'field2'=>$value2...));
Having previously sanitized your values of course.

Answer 4

+1 to Matthew Flaschen for the accepted answer, but I'll show you another tip. If you use SQL parameters with names the same as the entries in $_POST, you could take advantage of the fact that $_POST is already an array:
$q->execute($_POST);
The SQL parameter names are prefixed with a colon (:) but the keys in the $_POST array are not. But modern versions of PDO account for this - you no longer need to use colon prefixes in the keys in the array you pass to execute().
But you should be careful that anyone can add extra parameters to any web request, and you should get only the subset of $_POST params that match parameters in your query.
$q = $dbc -> prepare("INSERT INTO accounts (username, email, password)
VALUES (:username, :email, :password)");
$params = array_intersect_key($_POST, array("username"=>1,"email"=>1,"password"=>1));
$q->execute($params);

Answer 5

Personally, I prefer to use a wrapper function for all of pdo, which simplifies the code necessary substantially.
For example, to run bound queries (well, all my queries), I do this:
$iterable_resultset = query("INSERT INTO accounts (username, email, password) VALUES (:username, :email, :password)", array(':username'=>'bob', ':email'=>'bob#example.com', ':password'=>'bobpassword'));
Note that not only is the sql simply a string, but it's actually a reusable string, as you can simply pass the sql as a string and change the array of variables to pass in if you want to perform a similar insert right after that one (not applicable to this situation, but applicable to other sql use cases).
The code that I use to create this wrapper function is as below:
/**
* Run bound queries on the database.
*
* Use: query('select all from players limit :count', array('count'=>10));
* Or: query('select all from players limit :count', array('count'=>array(10, PDO::PARAM_INT)));
*
* Note that it returns foreachable resultset object unless an array is specifically requested.
**/
function query($sql, $bindings=array(), $return_resultset=true) {
DatabaseConnection::getInstance(); // Gets a singleton database connection
$statement = DatabaseConnection::$pdo->prepare($sql); // Get your pdo instance, in this case I use a static singleton instance. You may want to do something simpler.
foreach ($bindings as $binding => $value) {
if (is_array($value)) {
$first = reset($value);
$last = end($value);
// Cast the bindings when something to cast to was sent in.
$statement->bindParam($binding, $first, $last);
} else {
$statement->bindValue($binding, $value);
}
}
$statement->execute();
if ($return_resultset) {
return $statement; // Returns a foreachable resultset
} else {
// Otherwise returns all the data an associative array.
return $statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
}
}
// Wrapper to explicitly & simply get a multi-dimensional array.
function query_array($sql_query, $bindings=array()) {
return query($sql_query, $bindings, false); // Set return_resultset to false to return the array.
}
As noted in the comments, you'd want to use your own method for setting up a database connection and getting an initialized pdo, but in general it allows your bound sql to be cut down to just a single line.