simple UPDATE syntax not working!

nbennett

can anybody see anything wrong with the following UPDATE query?

$query ="UPDATE employed SET firstN='$firstName', lastN='$lastName', role='$job', active='$active' WHERE key='$primaryKey'";

I cut an pasted this from a working page, and now it's not working - the db connections are ok so it seems to be a straight up syntax problem, but I can't seem to see it...

thanks

YappyDog

try printing out the value of $query before you execute it to see what you have in your variables.

nbennett

i tried that & everything seems ok, - i also tried various combinations of single and double quotes -

the 'key' field is auto incrementing - would that be the culprit?

thanks

YappyDog

try it without the single quotes around your $primaryKey variable.

WHERE key=$primaryKey";

nbennett

tried that too - still nothing -

thanks for the help

ahundiak

What does mysql_error indicate?

nbennett

i'm running this as the final query:

if(!(@ mysql_query ($query, $connection))) {
echo $query;
}else {
header("Location: updated_success.php);
}

so that if the entry isn't updated, the page just gives me the query that isn't working.

when i add in the showerror(); before the 'echo $query;' line above, the page returns blank.

ideas? thanks for all the help...

nbennett

still not 100% sure what the problem was, but i broke up all the field name to be on separate lines, changed the name of the 'key' field to be 'id_key,' and added a LIMIT 1 at the end, and voila, seems to be working fine.

$query = "UPDATE my_table SET " .
"field1=\"$newfield1\"" . ", " .
"field2=\"$newfield2\"" . ", " .
"field3=\"$newfield3\"" . ", ".
"field4=\"$newfield4\"" .
" WHERE id_key=\"$id_key\" LIMIT 1";

thanks for all the help, and if anybody can clairify what difference the line breaks make, I'd love to know about it -