PHP: Debugging PDO connection to Access database (.accdb)

Question

I am new to programming and would like to connect to a ms-access (accdb) database using a PDO class. Environement: PHP (5.5.11) / XAMPP / Windows 7 pro. PDO driver for ODBC

Answer 1

You provide the connenction details in this string:

'odbc:DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)};DBQ=$this->$dbName;Uid=$this->$Uid;Pwd=$this->$Upass'

If we check how strings work in PHP we can read this about our single-quoted string:

Unlike the double-quoted and heredoc syntaxes, variables and escape sequences for special characters will not be expanded when they occur in single quoted strings.

So PHP will try to open a file called $this->$dbName, literally. So, to begin with, you possibly want one of these syntaxes instead:

• Double-quoted string: "File name $foo blah"
• Concatenation: 'File name ' . $foo . ' blah'

Now, you want to read the file name from an object property:

protected $dbName = "C:\xampp\htdocs\BillboardsManagement\Core\config\Billboards.accdb";

The manual explains that the syntax is:

$this->dbName

However, you have this:

$this->$dbName

Once you fix this, it's always a good idea to verify whether your variables contain what you think they do. For that, I recommend var_dump():

$connection_string = 'odbc:DRIVER={Microsoft ....';
var_dump($connection_string);

It's worth noting that everything I've explained is related to basic PHP syntax. Neither PDO nor Access issues have come up so far. It always help to isolate your issues.