Question

One of my recent questions (here) asked about how to catch errors (and display them with the ErrorController) in the Bootstrap file. The example I used was during database instantiation: if an error occurred in the Bootstrap, it would just dump the error onto the screen without calling the ErrorController.

But, say, in my database instantiation plugin, I have this code:

public function dispatchLoopStartup(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request) {
    $db = Zend_DB::factory("Pdo_Mysql", $this->config);
    Zend_Registry::set("db", $db);
}

No error will be thrown, even if the database isn’t connected. This is because Zend_DB doesn’t bother to check that the database is live, so as to not waste resources and time.

My question is whether I should do something like this:

public function dispatchLoopStartup(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request) {
    $db = Zend_DB::factory("Pdo_Mysql", $this->config);
    $db->getConnection();
    Zend_Registry::set("db", $db);
}

That way, any connectivity problems are caught early on and displayed. Is this a good idea? Should my application instead wait to check that the database connection is live on first usage?

Answer 1

I would setup specific handling of the Zend_Db exception type in my error controller.

PHP is not stateful, so initialization of the app is going to happen for every page request. What if my page request doesnt even need the DB (for example, my maintenance page, error pages, etc)?

Most importantly, what is the proper handling of no connection during bootstrap? How can you be sure that any other resources you need in order to render an error page have finished bootstrapping?

However, this is just my preference.