Return list of object from a Class

awedaonline

Hi all, I am new to PHP development after a reasonable experience with the .NET. I have just created a class to return list of categories from the category table and display on my home page. Below is my code snippets:

link = mysqli_connect($this->host, $this->username, $this->password);
if (!$this->link) {
// todo: display error
}
if (!mysqli_set_charset($this->link, 'utf8')) {
// todo: display error
}
if (!mysqli_select_db($this->link, $this->dbName)) {
// todo: display error
}
}

public function getAllCategories() {
    $sql = mysqli\_query($this->link, "CALL getCategories()");
    while ($row = mysqli\_fetch\_array($sql)){
        $row\['description'\] . '

';
}
return $row;
}
public function executeQuery ($query) {
if (!$this->query($query)) {
// todo: display error
}
}
}

?>

on my home.php page, I have:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="script/ref/jquery-1.6.2.min.js" /></script>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>

Graham Breach

Your getAllCategories function will return NULL, because it is returning the last value returned by mysqli_fetch_array($sql). You can return an array of results this way:

$results = array();
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($sql)){
$results[] = $row['description'];
}
return $results;

or a string:

$results = '';
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($sql)){
$results .= $row['description'] . '<br />';
}
return $results;

You also have $cat[] = $con->getAllCategories(); - this will add whatever the function returns as a new entry in the $cat array, which probably is not what you want.

awedaonline

Thank Graham; Your response was correct. So on my home.php page, this is what I finaly did:

$con = new Connection();
$cat = $con->getAllCategories();
foreach ($cat as $c) {
echo $c['description'] . '
';
}

But the result of the above was the first character of each record per row. How do I fix this?

Graham Breach

This is a bit confusing, but I've worked it out. You've already pulled the "description" field out of the row in the getAllCategories function - so now echo $c['description'] ... is accessing the string $c, and not an associative array. The square brackets are referring to the characters of the string, so 'description' is being evaluated as 0 and you are getting the first character in the string. Try using this instead:

echo $c . '<br />';

awedaonline

Thanks. I am very glad for your response. Now, I am getting it right. Please don't be annoyed. Thanks once again.