use pdo in try/catch clause on the live site - pdo

Question

Should I use try/catch clause to write the PDO on the live site?
If I use try/catch clause to write it, all the errors details will appear on the web page. To prevent this happened, how do I know what errors are made without showing it on the web page?

Answer 1

That's a very good question, and - to my utter surprise - an extremely rare one. As though there are no developers running a live site around. And all the answers we have here is a mere proof for this surprising statement.
Should I use try/catch clause to write the PDO on the live site?
Of course no.
If I use try/catch clause to write it, all the errors details will appear on the web page.
It is not actually because of try-catch but because you're echoing them in that block yourself. But anyway, you shouldn't use that block either.
To prevent this happened, how do I know what errors are made without showing it on the web page?
You have to let them to be logged. To do so, you shouldn't use try-catch in the first place. Despite of all the wrong examples over the net, this operator has very little to do with reporting errors, and have to be used to handle errors, not to report them.
Surprisingly, PHP is very good at error logging. You won't believe me, but it can handle such a laborous task itself. Instead of wrapping each and every sql statement in try-catch, just leave them alone. In case of error, an exception will be thrown, yet uncaught exception is a fatal error. And for a live site you should have set error logging mode already. Means your PDO error will be logged as well.
As a result, to let yourself know what happened, all you need is to peek into error log.
In a nutshell, you shouldn't treat PDO error as something special. In either way, it's yet another error that happened in your code. Exactly the same as memory overflow error, or file not found error, or permission denied error. There is no special meaning in PDO errors and there is not a single reason to handle them in any special way. Just treat them as any other error in your site. In dev environment happily echo them on the screen for easy debugging, while on the live site disable error displaying and enable error logging, and you're set. I.e.
for a dev server:
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors',1);
ini_set('log_errors',1);
while for a live one
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors',0);
ini_set('log_errors',1);