Using A Loop To Write To Table

[Anon]

Hello Folks,

My challenge is to write 15 rows of employee hours to the database. Each row has the same variable names, the only thing that changes is the index number. I'm trying to use a loop where I concatenate the loop index number with the variable name. My code has a major bug. It seems to be writing an infinite number of records to the database. Could someone give me some feedback please:

//give variable table name
$tableName = "tbl_labour";

//create sql statement
$add = "Insert into $tableName(job_number, job_date, employee_name,
regular_time, travel_time, over_time )values
('%s','%s', '%s','%s','%s','%s' )";

//=================================================================
//initialize counter
$x = (int)1;

//start loop
while ($x <= 15)
{

//concatenate variable names
$employee_name = ${"employee_name".$x};
$regular_time = ${"regular_time".$x};
$travel_time = ${"travel_time".$x};
$over_time = ${"over_time".$x};

// write employee info to database

//check that value is set
if (!empty($employee_name))
{
//check that either regular or overtime hours field is not blank
if ((!$regular_time) && (!$over_time))
{
DisplayErrMsg("Error: Regular hours and over time hours cannot both be blank for employee $x");
exit();
}
else
{
//execute query
if(!mysql_query(sprintf($add,$job_number, $job_date, $employee_name, $regular_time, $travel_time, $over_time ), $link))
{
DisplayErrMsg(sprintf("Error in executing %s stmt", $stmt));
DisplayErrMsg(sprintf("error:%d %s", mysql_errno($link), mysql_error($link)));
exit();
}
}
}

$x = $x + 1;

}

[Anon]

A few things:

I think PHP is a typeless language in that it doesn't care what kind of information its variables hold so for line:
//initialize counter
$x = (int)1;

simply change that to $x=1;
Check the use of your dynamic variables in
$employee_name = ${"employee_name".$x}; .... etc

Are you sure that its producing what you expect? Catch the errors by surrounding it with a lot of echo and print statements, printing the values each time it iteratoes over the loop.

Finally, I could have totally missed the point here but your PHP code looks more like C than PHP. Are you sure this thing even runs? Hmmm... But in whatever case, the infinite loop is obviously caused by it never hitting the sentinel portion of your code (if one is assigned or expected) and based on the code, the $x (counter) variable should be checked and that it is properly incremented.

Hope that helps.

jm