data inputinto multiple tables?

[roy]

I'm tring to write a link program. so far i've managed to be able to et the program to grab the categories list and put it in the input form.

what i want to do is when someone submits a page with links on it (they can also select categories), it inputs all the data into the links table as well as another table (cat_link) with linkID and catID, but i need the linkID in the cat_link table to match that with the links table.

how do i do this?

[eoghain]

Depending on the database that you are using, PHP should have a function to allow you to get the last generated id. This funciton [man]mysql_insert_id/man for MySQL will return the ID generated from the last INSERT statement. The only time you'd have a problem with this is if you happen to have multiple users entering links pages at the same time and they submit at just the right speed to cause both INSERTS to process before the first [man]mysql_insert_id/man call processes, but that would be a rare thing to happen.

[roy]

yes i was htinking about that ... but is there generally another way to do this?

i'm sure that with relational tables that people use some method of inputting data into two fields at one time... how? i'm asking more of theory i guess... but specific examples would help 🙂

[eoghain]

You can insert data into 2 fields in the same table, but you can't insert data into 2 tables with 1 insert.

You can build triggers and stored procedures (if your database supports them) to do this work for you, but that isn't PHP it's database specific.