Question

Let’s say you have a class, with certain properties, and that you tried your best so those properties would match the column names in a database in a way that you could fit each row of a db into your class object.

The way I usually do this, is by creating a method $class->get_all() to query the database for all the rows that match a specific query. From the resource set, I then create several sql objects, with mysql_fetch_object($resource) and store them in one array which is then returned. Basically something like this usually happens:

<?php 
    while($row = mysql_fetch_object($result_set)){
        $class->id = $row->id;
        $class->name = $row->name;
        $class->birthdate = $row->birthdate;

        $output[] = $class;
    }

    return $output;
?>

… which means I have 2 objects ($row and $class), with the same properties, and I am copying one of them into the other.

Is there a way to optimize this? Like, instead of copying the values from one to the other, maybe set them as a pointer to the same sql object property?

Answer 1

With PDO:

<?php

    $pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database_name", "user", "pass");
    $pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    $pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES, false);
    $stmt = $pdo->query("SELECT `id`, `username`, `password` FROM `whatever`");

    while ($class = $stmt->fetchObject("YourClassNameHere")) {
        /*
        * $class now holds an object of type YourClassNameHere
        * With all properties set properly.
        */
    }

Note: this is a simplified example. In production code, you may need to take user-input into account, in which case you use prepared statements. That does not change the way you should fetch the results.