I have a user a object that looks like this.
$user = new User();
$user->name = 'Name';
$user->age = 34;
In my database there are five fields,
id, name, age, location, reputation
I have a method that (for all my tables) collects all the fields dynamically from a table with the following SQL. This way I can dynamically get the number of place-holders to put in an INSERT statement.
SHOW FIELDS FROM users
SHOW FIELDS FROM questions
SHOW FIELDS FROM topics
I then have written a create method that counts the number of fields in the table and prepares a string full of placeholders and automatically insert it into my PDO query making this:
INSERT INTO users VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
I then take my $user object and make an array out of all the properties that it has and give that array to my PDO prepared statement in the execute parameter. This works fine and the function inserts data into the database.
My problem is that sometimes I dont yet have all the properties for my objects filled in and I therefore populate the rest of the array that feeds the execute function with empty strings. When it reaches a field that takes an integer, it causes a fatal error and doesn’t work. What can I do to be able to insert empty fields into my database dynamically without writing the correct data-type for each field in my code? Because this is all done dynamically I cannot know ahead of time to put an integer or an empty string there. Is there a way to leave out some placeholders altogether? Any other solutions?
Set your optional mysql fields to accept NULL.