My youngest son is learning how to code.
He is working on a PHP fitness application.
He’s built his demo app using PHP and MySQL and I want to run the code on my PC but I don’t have MySQL and don’t want to install it either.
Instead, I’ll try to do something much harder.
I’ll make his code connect to a Microsoft Access Database instead.
It was harder than I thought it would be initially.
I tried an ODBC connection but had to abandon it after having way too many issues running 32-bit ODBC drivers on 64 bit Windows that is trying to Microsoft Access Database files.
To get this to work, I had to enable an ODBC dll in the PHP.ini file. Then trial and error coding until I found some code that works but I ended up having to learn about PHP PDO and use that for connecting to the Access Database instead of a strait OBDC connection.
Configuring PHP to use a Microsoft Access Database
- Enable an ODBC.dll in the PHP.ini file
- Use code below to connect to the Microsoft Access Database using PHP PDO
PHP code I used to connect a PHP page to a Microsoft Access Database
<?php
try {
$dbName = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "phpFitness_Trackerlifting_tracker.mdb";
if (!file_exists($dbName)) {
die("Could not find database file." . $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "phpFitness_Trackerlifting_tracker.mdb" );
}
$db = new PDO("odbc:DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=$dbName; Uid=; Pwd=;");
/*** The SQL SELECT statement ***/
$sql = "SELECT * FROM lifting_tracker";
/*** fetch into an PDOStatement object ***/
$stmt = $db->query($sql);
$stmt2 = $db->query($sql);
/*** echo number of columns ***/
$result = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
/*** loop over the object directly ***/
foreach($result as $key=>$val) {
echo $key.' - '.$val.'<br />';
echo 'Reps: ' . $result['reps']. '<br />';
}
/*** loop over the object directly ***/
while ($row = $stmt2->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC))
{
echo 'This is from the while loop! ' . $row['reps']. '<br />';
}
}
catch(PDOException $e) {
echo $e->getMessage();
}
$db = null;
?>
