PHP Expert
Nilesh Pawar

PHP has some really sweet new features and one of them is the ability to throw and catch exceptions.
When I was browsing Sitepoint I read a post saying that the only thing they need to do is get rid of the class-"hinting" in the catch clause. I guess they didn\'t get the point of extending the base Exception class.
I\'ve found extending the Exception class useful when reporting the errors back from a Database connection object. Basically I wanted to return a message array to describe the problem in English, then with additional messages from MySQL. This is really just so I can separate HTML from the PHP, for instance I could just return "Could not connect to database: " . mysql_error() and be done with it, but if a design changes and strong isn\'t applicable or something, it\'s not that much good. Ok, so perhaps I\'m just being anally-retentive but it\'s cool to demonstrate anyway.
class DatabaseException extends Exception
{
  private $error;    (1)

  function __construct($error) (2)
  {
    $this->error = $error;
  }

  function getMessageArray()
  {
    return $this->error;
  }

}
1.    Yup, you use either "public" "private" or "protected" when declaring variables now. Unfortunately they\'re not C++ style-so you have to use them for each variable.
2.    Also you use __construct for constructors.
Next the simple database class:
class Database
{
  private $host;
  private $password;
  private $user;
  private $database;
  public $connection_tracker;

  function __construct($host, $user, $password, $database)
  {
    $this->host = $host;
    $this->password = $password;
    $this->user = $user;
    $this->database = $database;
    $this->connect();
  }

  function connect()
  {
    if (!$this->connection_tracker = @mysql_connect($this->host, $this->user, $this->password))
    {
      $error_array =  array ( (1)
      "message" => "Could not connect to MySQL daemon",
      "database_reports" => mysql_error()
      );

      throw new DatabaseException($error_array);
    }
  }
}
1.    Passing the array of messages we want to the class to access:
try
{
  $Database = new Database(\'localhost\', \'rot\', \'discovery\', \'table\'); (1)
}

catch (DatabaseException $e)
{
  $error_messages = $e->getMessageArray();
  echo $error_messages[\'message\'];
  echo $error_messages[\'database_reports\'];
}
1.    Username supposed to be root.
Pretty cool eh? Now you can put the HTML around it as required by the design. Anally retentive, sure, but I\'m sure you can think of some other uses from extending the Exception class