Question

I have the following piece of code:

$clicks = $statement->prepare($query);
$offers->bindValue(1, $id, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$clicks->execute();
$results = $clicks->fetchAll();

• The Query works fine
• The binding works fine

What actually makes me wonder, why I have to first execute() the query to can call fetchAll().
I’ve come to this solution/assumption since, execute() only returns true/false and without calling execute(), fetchAll() will not return anything.
Is this the normal way of doing that?

I’ve been working with PDO before, long time ago, so I can’t quite remember how to deal with it properly.

Thank you very much

(I use PHP5.3, the above used code is PDO/PDOStatement)

Answer 1

Well, SELECT * FROM myTable is just a piece of text and you have to send it to the server first, which parses it etc, before you can fetchAll(). The reason that fetchAll doesn’t automatically execute() is that fetchAll can be called twice, and you don’t want to execute the query twice if you only have to do it once 🙂

It’s also related to parameter binding etc. Parameters can change but you might still want to use the fetch functions on the original parameter value.

It’s a design thing, which makes programming with PDO a lot easier. It just requires 1 more line of code 🙂

You could probably create a wrapper and make fetchAll() do both the execution and the fetch, but you’re definitely going to run into trouble.

edit:
Another reason is that execute() actually takes an optional array of parameters which allows you to bind parameters. $stmt -> execute(array($id)); would allow you to skip the bindValue calls.