What am I doing wrong?...

[zzz]

Hi,

all I'm trying to do is when I get a list of users on one page I click on a button next to that user, pass variables such as email, name, username etc. to another page where

I send a canned message using @mail($email.........

this part works just fine. But I also need to update a field in that user's table row. So I try to do this but it doesn't work:

$db = mysql_connect("my_db_path", "my_db_pass", "my_db_user");
mysql_select_db("db_name",$db);
function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{
$update = mysql_query("update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'");
}

So what am I doing wrong. Wasted at least an hour but can't figure it out. Please someone help!

😕

[jnuneznyc]

After your sql update use this command and then post the result back to this forum thread.

echo mysql_errno() . ' : ' . mysql_error();

[zzz]

Thanks for your help. Since I'm not really familiar with this debugging method I tried it two different ways:

First it tried:

$db = mysql_connect("my_db_path", "my_db_pass", "my_db_user");
mysql_select_db("db_name",$db);
function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{
$update = mysql_query("update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'");
echo mysql_errno() . ' : ' . mysql_error();
}

It returned nothing. Then I tried:

$db = mysql_connect("my_db_path", "my_db_pass", "my_db_user");
mysql_select_db("db_name",$db);
function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{
$update = mysql_query("update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'");
}
echo mysql_errno() . ' : ' . mysql_error();

...and got:

0 :

Does that help at all?

[enterume]

try this:

$db = mysql_connect("my_db_path", "my_db_pass", "my_db_user");
mysql_select_db("db_name",$db);
function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{
global $db;
$update = mysql_query("update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'");

if (!$update) echo mysql_errno() . ' : ' . mysql_error();
}
remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)

[xblue]

and echo your query to see if it looks as you expect it to. sometimes the query is syntactically correct, but doesn't select or update anything because e.g. the where condition isn't what you want it to be.

$update = "update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'"; 
echo $update.'<br />';
mysql_query($update);

[zzz]

Ok, this is freaky...

I made it work and was able to cut down on some code. Can someone explain it to me why do I have to have the empty {} in order for it to work?

Here's the working version:

$db = mysql_connect("my_db_path", "my_db_pass", "my_db_user");
mysql_select_db("db_name",$db);
function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{ }
$update = "update my_table set field_that_needs_update = '$field_that_needs_update' where username = '$username'";
mysql_query($update);

[xblue]

does not really seem freaky to me.

if you define a function, something is supposed to happen in there, and this would be grouped by the {}.

if you don't do anything in the function, you probably don't need it at all, so you might want to delete it altogether.

remove:

function remind ($username, $field_that_needs_update)
{ }

[zzz]

You're right! I have that tendency to over-think some simple things.