PHP prepared statements

[chronomantic]

Hey everyone. I'm not a very good OO programmer but I'm really trying to learn 🙂 I'm new to OO programming AND prepared statements, so I'm fairly positive I'm just doing something lame wrong.

I'm having an issue trying to create a method in a Database class that uses PHP prepared statements to insert a user into a database. I'm assuming this is a syntax/logical error because when I made the method use mysqli_query($connection, $query) it ran fine, but when I tried to alter it to use prepared statements it doesn't 'break' anything, but the query never gets executed.

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could help point out where I went wrong! Here's the code:

class Database {

	private $connection;


	// CONSTRUCT FUNCTION
	function __construct() {
		$this->open_connection();
	}


	// OPEN_CONNETION FUNCTION
	public function open_connection() {

		$this->connection = mysqli_connect(DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_NAME);
		if (!$this->connection) {
			die("Database connection failed: " . mysqli_error());
		}	
	}
// CREATE USER FUNCTION
public function createUser() {
                        $stmt = $this->connection->stmt_init();
			$query = "INSERT INTO users values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)";
			if($stmt->prepare($query)) {
				$stmt->bind_param('issss', null, $user_fname, $user_lname, $user_email, $user_status);

			$user_fname = "Jane";
			$user_lname = "Doe";
			$user_email = "[e-mail]";
			$user_status = "a";
			$stmt->execute();
			$stmt->close();
		}
	}
}

And then, to run the function I have

$database = new Database();
$database->createUser();

After I get this to work I'm just going to alter the createUser() method to take the insert values as parameters.

Thanks!

[chronomantic]

Well I figured out how to turn on PHP error handling on my server (haha) and it helped me figure this out on my own.... I also have to pass the user_id as a variable. It doesn't like 'null'.