Re: Problem with populating Dropdown Menu with PDO

[Frank Olschewski]

Included it and it just shows nothing, just breaking the form at the point where it shows the dropdown menu, consisting of no options.

I included the catch PDOException for the connection code line and it works now, but I have no idea why - the catch PDOException is just for error reporting, isn't it?

So now I have:

<select name="subject">
<?php

try {
    $pdo = new PDO($dsn, $user, $pw);
    }  catch(PDOException $e) {
    echo 'ERROR: ' . $e->getMessage();
}

    try
    {
        /*** query the database ***/
        $result = $pdo->query("SELECT subject_id, subject FROM subjects");

        /*** loop over the results ***/
        foreach($result as $row)
        {
            /*** create the options ***/
            echo '<option value="'.$row['subject_id'].'"';

            echo '>'. $row['subject'] . '</option>'."\n";
        }
    }
    catch(PDOException $e)
    {
        echo 'No Results';
    }
?>
</select>

Do I always have to include the catch PDOException to make the connection work? I am used to just do the connection code line as it was the case with mysql (mysql_connect etc.).

Greetings,
Frank