How to properly set up a PDO connection

Question

From time to time I see questions regarding connecting to database.
Most answers is not the way I do it, or I might just not get the answers correctly. Anyway; I\'ve nev

Answer 1

I recently came to a similar answer/question on my own. This is what I did, in case anyone is interested:

args = func_get_args();
    }

  public function __call($method, $args)
    {
    if (empty($this->db))
      {
      $Ref = new \ReflectionClass('\PDO');
      $this->db = $Ref->newInstanceArgs($this->args);
      }

    return call_user_func_array(array($this->db, $method), $args);
    }
  }

To call it you only need to modify this line:

$DB = new \Library\PDO(/* normal arguments */);

And the type-hinting if you are using it to (\Library\PDO $DB).

It's really similar to both the accepted answer and yours; however it has a notably advantage. Consider this code:

$DB = new \Library\PDO( /* args */ );

$STH = $DB->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = ?");
$STH->execute(array(25));
$User = $STH->fetch();

While it might look like normal PDO (it changes by that \Library\ only), it actually doesn't initialize the object until you call the first method, whichever it is. That makes it more optimized, since the PDO object creation is slightly expensive. It's a transparent class, or what it's called a Ghost, a form of Lazy Loading. You can treat the $DB as a normal PDO instance, passing it around, doing the same operations, etc.