Pass array to SQL Server Function/Stored Procedure using PHP PDO

Question

I've gotten to a point where I absolutely need some clean way to safely pass lists/arrays from php to SQL server stored procedures and table value functions. The PHP SQL server driver still does not support table valued parameters, according to Microsoft docs .

In another question , using XML was suggested as an alternative.

Does anyone have a code sample for passing the equivalent of a TVP using an XML stream and PHP PDO or another clean alternative?

Answer 1

The primitive, but foolproof solution, is to pass it as a delimited string, and use a SPLIT function in your proc to convert the string to a table that you can then JOIN to.

Google SQL SPLIT FUNCTION to get free cut-n-paste code.

Answer 2

You could use xml, but a better, more compact idea would be to use JSON.

$myArray = array("thing 1", "thing 2", "thing 3");
$sql = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO `table` (`array_data`) VALUES (:myArray)");
$sql->execute(array(":myArray"=>json_encode($myArray)));

Then when you pull the data back out of the database you can convert it back into an array with:

$myArray = json_decode($res['myArray'], true);