Cannot use object of type PDOStatement as array

Question

I want to check if some column of specify user is holding a value higher than 0.

Problem

When doing the query, and then executing it

Answer 1

From:

$admin = $CONNECT_TO_DATABASE->prepare("SELECT * FROM admin WHERE username = :username");
[...]
if ($settings['create_admins'] > 0 || $admin['super_admin'] > 0 ) {

$admin is of type PDOStatament which is a class and not an array. Therefore you can't call the [] operator on it.

Also you should really not alway assign $admin to the return result of every method because most of the PDOStatament's methods return boolean values:

$admin = $CONNECT_TO_DATABASE->prepare("SELECT * FROM admin WHERE username = :username");
$admin->bindValue(':username', $_SESSION['user']);
$admin->execute();

To retrieve the super_admin column from the admin table you should add (after the execute() statement):

$result = $admin->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

which will populate (hopefully, it depends on what's the table schema) $result['super_admin'].

Answer 2

try this:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM admin WHERE username = ?";
$stmt = $CONNECT_TO_DATABASE->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute(array($_SESSION['user']));
$admin = $stmt->fetch();
if($admin) {
   //do something if query returns row(s)
}