php pdo displaying rowCount in mvc

Question

I am working with a new mvc framework ( view here ) and I have ran into a slight problem.

I have a table named ' favourite ' which looks like below;

---------------------------
id    user_id    book_id
1      2          1777      
2      3          1887
3      2          1023
4      7          8776
5      2          8811
---------------------------

I am trying to display the number of favourites for a specific on their profile page ( Hello. You have x favourites ). I feel I am misunderstanding something regarding the mvc structure or have a syntax issue somewhere?

On my showprofile I don't have any errors, it's simply blank where the count should be. When I run the query in phpmyadmin I get a result of 3 which is correct.

I have read that rowCount() can be unreliable so I have also tried fetchColumn() amongst other variations. Do I need to use a second query?

New to php/sql/mvc so any advice is appreciated.

My code is as follows;

login_model.php (model)

class LoginModel
{
    public function favouriteTotal()
    {
        $query = $this->db->prepare("SELECT COUNT(book_id) FROM favourite WHERE user_id = 2");
        $query->execute();
        $count = $query->rowCount()       
    }
}

showprofile.php (view)

<div>
    Hello. Your have this number of favourites: 
           <?php echo $this->count ?> 
</div>

login.php (controller)

class Login extends Controller
{
    function showProfile()
    {
        $login_model = $this->loadModel('Login');
        $this->view->count = $login_model->favouriteTotal();
        $this->view->render('login/showprofile');
    }
}

Answer 1

Your issue is that you're executing a COUNT query, when you should be using a SELECT query if you want to use the rowCount function.

This query would let your rowCount function work:

SELECT `book_id` FROM favourite WHERE user_id = 2

Alternatively, you could continue to use the COUNT statement, but you would then need to get the first result from your query instead of a row count.