Session values are empty in PHP except one

Question

I was creating a user management system, then I stored four user sessions in an array after user has logged in. Like the following:

$se = new UserModel($this->pdo);
$userData = $se->get($email);

if ($userData) {
  $userDataArray = [
    'email' => $email,
    'first_name' => $userData->first_name,
    'last_name' => $userData->last_name,
    'roles' => $userData->roles
  ];
  var_dump($userData);
  $_SESSION['USER_DATA'] = $userDataArray;
} 

but it was empty when I tried to use the first name and last_name like:

<?=$_SESSION['USER_DATA']['first_name'] ." ". $_SESSION['USER_DATA']['last_name']?>

and I print_r the $_SESSION variable which gives and showing the other array of session is empty:

array(1) { 
  ["USER_DATA"]=> array(4) { 
    ["email"]=> string(15) "[email protected]" 
    ["first_name"]=> NULL 
    ["last_name"]=> NULL 
    ["roles"]=> NULL 
  } 
}

How do I solve this please?

Answer 1

Simply add PDO::FETCH_OBJ to the fetch PDO function

Like this:

public function get($email) {
            
            $sql = "SELECT * FROM $this->table WHERE email = :email";
            
            $stmt = $this->pdo->prepare($sql);
            $stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
            $stmt->execute();
            $user = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_OBJ);
        
            return $user;
        }

Why? because the $userData is being setup to fetch an Object