Question

When I try to bind overloaded property in PDOStatement::bindParam method,

$stmt->bindParam(':'.$field.'', $this->$field, $pdoparam);
...

public function __get($param)
    {
        if(isset($this->$param))
            return $this->$param;
    }

I get a notice

Notice: Indirect modification of overloaded property Msgs::$posttime has no effect in ...

After some research I found a bug report about the similar problem at php.net. The proposed solution is to add a & before __get definition.

&__get(...

But when I try to do that I get another notice

Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in ...

PHP version is 5.3.8.

Is there any solution to this problem?

Answer 1

PDOStatement::bindParam requires a reference and potentially modifies the argument that was passed to it (converts it to the most appropriate type, or writes the result to it if it’s an OUT/INOUT parameter).

PDOStatement::bindValue doesn’t take a reference and doesn’t modify the argument.

__get returns the value of $this->$param but doesn’t actually make it a reference to the $this->$param, and making a reference to the returned value produces this notice. It is not specific to PDO, even a simple $x =& $this->$param will trigger the same notice. Use bindValue instead of bindParam to avoid this.

Some more explanation about a non-reference __get: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5337433/1233508