Natively Connect to Gmail Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Gmail into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Gmail-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Gmail 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.

There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

In addition to the OAuth values, provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Gmail by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

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

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the 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.

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

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('[email protected]'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Subject, Size FROM Inbox");
 

Process Results

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Subject, Size FROM Inbox");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Subject"] . "\n";
}

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('[email protected]'));
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 Gmail-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.