[RESOLVED] Duplicate Record Issue

webmasternovis

Hi all,

I have a regular script which inserts data into a mysql database. The database has a column called "name", which is what my problem surrounds.

The thing is, sometimes records that have the same name are added. When this happens I want a digit to be put at the end of the name, so if it's the second duplicate entry, it would be My Name 2, third My Name 3 etc.

Does anyone know how I could achieve this in PHP? My script at the moment is just a simple thing that adds the records into mysql.

Thanks,
Mike 🙂

NogDog

Probably a better solution would be to handle it via the database. You could add primary key column which is an auto-increment integer. This would be the unique identifier for each record, used to specify which record is to be updated, selected, etc., whereas the name field would be primarily for information and display purposes.

webmasternovis

Unfortunately that wouldn't work, as the information from the database is accessed through a URL, which involves the "name" column.

Know of any other solutions?

webmasternovis

Ok, problem solved. I ended up using a do while loop which seemed to work.

NogDog

webmasternovis wrote:
Unfortunately that wouldn't work, as the information from the database is accessed through a URL, which involves the "name" column.

Know of any other solutions?

Then you would change the url and code logic to use the unique, numeric id value instead.

If you have to check to see if the same name already exists, add a number, then insert it into the DB, you still risk dupliate values due to "race conditions" where two nearly simultaneous requests end up inserting the same name/number combination.

It's much more robust and efficient to normalize your data rather than coming up with a less-than-perfect workaround.