Natively Connect to Discord Data in PHP

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
The CData ODBC driver for Discord enables you to create PHP applications with connectivity to Discord data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Discord into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Discord-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Discord data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Discord Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Discord.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Discord (see below).

Discord API Profile Settings

Visit the Discord Developer Portal, create or select an application, and navigate to the OAuth2 section to obtain your Client ID and Client Secret.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Discord by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Application WHERE IsVerified = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Application WHERE IsVerified = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('true'));
  

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Name FROM Application WHERE IsVerified = 'true'");
  

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Discord data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Name FROM Application WHERE IsVerified = 'true'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Id"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Discord data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Application WHERE IsVerified = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('true'));
if($success)
  odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Discord-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Discord with the API Driver

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