Question

When establishing a new PDO db handler, I’ve got to wrap everything into a try-catch to prevent an error message that would print all db access data to the user.

But how about all the other methods like exec(), for example? Must I wrap all of these into a try-catch block? At which point is the PHP documentation telling that an method throws an exception?

Answer 1

First of all, you can set how errors are dealt with by PDO, using the PDO::setAttribute method, to set the PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE (error reporting) option.

In particular, it is possible to configure PDO so it throws exceptions when there’s an error, instead of reporting an “error” — that’s what I generally do.

Then, when a method can throw an exception, it should be indicated in it’s documentation — generaly, it’s in the “Return value” section.

For instance, PDO::prepare can throw an exception — depending on error reporting (see what I wrote just before) :

If the database server cannot
successfully prepare the statement,
PDO::prepare() returns FALSE or
emits PDOException (depending on
error handling).

As a sidenote : if you find a function / method that throws an exception, and it’s not indicated in its documentation, it might be a good idea to create a bug report (see http://bugs.php.net/ ), so that problem is corrected 😉

(Errors / mistakes / missing informations in the documentation are treated via the bug-tracker, like any other bug)