Test data generator for PHP - Building a wrapper

PHP Libraries Test data generator for PHP - Building a wrapper

In the previous lesson, Finishing the Image library for PHP, we designed a script and described what the core and entities will do. In today's tutorial, we're going to finish the core and fill our first database table with random names.

Database wrapper

Since our script will work with the database a lot, a very basic database wrapper simply won't do. Therefore, we're going to make it more sophisticated. Our script will be able to create a database table as well. That's why our database wrapper will include the createTableIfNotExists() method. The wrapper will contain the insertInto(), connect(), and query() methods. All of the methods will be static. Name your database wrapper something like DatabaseManager.

connect()

The connect() method will be very simple. The database wrapper will have a private static $db attribute where a PDO instance will be stored. We'll create the instance in the connect() method. The method will accept 4 parameters: a server, a database name, a user, and a password. Then, we'll tell connect() to set the encoding to UTF-8. The connect() method will gather all of this together:

class DatabaseManager
{

        private static $db;

        static function connect($server, $db, $user, $password)
        {
                self::$db = new PDO("mysql:host=$server;dbname=$db", $user, $password,
                array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8'));
        }
}

query()

The query() method will execute

...End of the preview...

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In this tutorial, we'll finish the core used to generate random data into a MySQL database. We'll create a database wrapper and generate a table of names.

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The author is a programmer, who likes web technologies and being the lead/chief article writer at ICT.social. He shares his knowledge with the community and is always looking to improve. He believes that anyone can do what they set their mind to.

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