INSERT/UPDATE is not working

PunkGo

ok, when a user clicks on a link...its like www.blah.com/market.php?item=1
where item is the item's id...so i have a code like this...

$item_name1 = $item_info ['item_name'];
mysql_query("UPDATE users SET inventory=$item_name1 WHERE username='$auth_user' ");

but when i go into phpmyadmin and look under my field, inventory nothing shows up...if i would try INSERT....how would i let the code know which field to insert it into? thx.

Weedpacket

For one thing, INSERT and UPDATE do to different things: INSERT inserts new records and UPDATE updates existing records. There's unlikely to be many cases where you'd be uncertain about which to use.

For your problem, I'm making guesses about your database structure and the sort of data you're storing, but if item_name is the name of an item then I guess it's not just a number; so you'd want to be putting it in quotes in the query - just as you are already doing for username.

UPDATE users SET inventory='$item_name1' WHERE username='$auth_user'

If I'm right, what would have been happening would have been that you're sending this broken query to MySQL, MySQL is choking on it and sending back an error message, and you're not making any attempt in the script to find out whether the query succeeds or not or what the error message is if it doesn't.

rgermain

For better error checking I suggest something like the following:

$q = "UPDATE users SET inventory='$item_name1' WHERE username='$auth_user'"
mysql_query($q) or die(mysql_error());

PunkGo

thank u...it works...but like i want a user to have ALOT of items...but when it updates...it like jus puts 1 in their...like say i alrdy have 1 ring in the field...then if i click on link again, it will update it to jus 1 ring instead of 2....i tried

$result_user = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$auth_user'");
$user_info = mysql_fetch_array($result_user);
$user_inventory = $user_info['inventory'];

mysql_query("UPDATE users SET inventory='$user_inventory' + '$item_name1' WHERE username='$auth_user'");

but just sets the inventory to 0 ....yea the number 0