Troubleshooting PDO: Error not caught when executing prepared statement

Question

I have run into a problem using pdo because an error was not caught.

The code is simple and works just fine, I´ll just include a sample to avoid confusion:

    $sql = 'INSERT INTO somedatetable (something) VALUES (:something) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE something=:something'
    try {
        $stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql);
        $values = array(":something" => $something);

        $stmt->execute($values);

    } catch (PDOException $e) {
        echo "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
    }

The code works fine, however when working on a new module, I ran into a problem that no records were added or modified and no error was caught.

$stmt returned false but I did not have a clue why or how to find the error.

The solution was simple in the end, I was using a limited MySQL user that did not have write permissions to the table. These errors always displayed right away when using mysql, but using PDO I do not know how to get to them.

How do I get PHP / PDO to display or catch these kind of database errors?

Answer 1

PDO::errorInfo() or PDOStatement->errorInfo()

As for exceptions, check the docs for error handling in PDO. Exceptions aren't thrown by default.