Of course, an hour before an important meeting is when we discover it doesn’t work on any mac browser. The flash debug output shows our site initialization code is just throwing a fit. No DB access settings can be found. Doesn’t make any sense why an HTTP request from flash on a mac would break our app.

Here’s the basics of how our our setup switches dev/production settings:

It makes considerations for www. etc. The problem in this case is that flash is adding :80 to the HTTP Host header. Instead of

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

Flash for mac likes to add

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com:80

This will cause ‘example.com:80′ to show up in the php $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable. You can see how this would break simple host detection.

require_once('DB.php');
$db =& DB::connect("mysql://user:pass@host/dbname");
$sql = "SELECT * FROM foo";
$query = $db->query($sql);
$result = $query->fetchRow();

Which is a slightly different API than the DB class I was using at ResTek for a long time:

require_once('DB.php');
$db = new db('database');
$sql = "SELECT * FROM foo";
$query = $db->query($sql);
$result = $db->fetch_assoc($query);

It was a little annoying to rewrite code / retrain my brain for PEAR’s API, but it makes things easier.

Now when you call DB::connect, you do not get a DB object back but a DB_mysql (or whatever DB you specified). I tried making my own MY_DB class to return the right objects. Disaster. I was successful with copying and renaming the classes DB, DB_common, and DB_mysql. Now I was able to insert my own code in the DB_mysql::query method. Sweet.

I eventually trimmed it down to just extending the DB_mysql class. Here’s a sniplet that works very well for me:

class DB_MIKE_mysql extends DB_mysql {

    function &query($sql) {

        $query =& DB_mysql::query($sql);

        if ($this->isError($query)) {

            /* custom error code here */

        }

        return $query;
    }
}

$db =& DB::connect("MIKE_mysql://user:pass@host/dbname");

The DB::connect function loads a class called DB_$WHATS_IN_THE_DSN, so getting the custom class name right was the tricky part. PEAR seems to like this on php4 and php5.