Question

I keep getting “Fatal error: Call to a member function prepare() on a non-object in /var/www/html/portal_core/build_portal.php on line 30”.
I am new to PDO and I’m really using this as a test to get my head around it. could you guys help me to understand what I am doing wrong ?

 <?php

class build_portal 
{
protected $dbh; 

function __construct($dbname,$theme)
{
    try
    {
    $dbh = new PDO('mysql:dbname='.$dbname.';host=localhost',"username","password");
    $dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    $this->log_error("Construct 1st Try statement 3rd Line");
    }
    catch (PDOException $e)
    {
        echo "Page Could Not Be Loaded";
        return -1;
    }



}

function log_error($cause)
{
    try
    {
    $sth = $this->dbh->prepare("SELECT * from portal_errors");
    $sth->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
    $sth->execute();
    }
    catch (PDOException $e)
    {
        print_r($e->errorInfo);
    }
}

}
?>

Answer 1

It looks to be a matter of scope. You ought to assign dbh to $this->dbh in the constructor. When you access it later in log_error(), you are expecting it to be a class property but it was originally defined as a local variable in the constructor.

$this->dbh = new PDO('mysql:dbname='.$dbname.';host=localhost',"username","password");
$this->dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);