MYSQL Insert Record IF Statement Problem

thephpnewbie

Hi,

I am very new to PHP but am learning fast, however I have hit a bit of a stumbling block, basically I have a Holiday Villa website I am making and the user can book a holiday accrording to the date month and the year and can choose between the different villas there are around 25, but basically what I don't want to happen is people booking the same villa on the same day, of the same week of the same month of the same year so i need to write an IF statement to stop this.

However I am struggling to nail it, in english/very poor basic php I need to say

$table = 'the table I am using'

$query = mysql_query("SELECT 'Villa', 'Day', 'Week', 'Month', 'Year' FROM $table);

$check = mysql_fetch_array($query);

IF ( $_POST (after pressing submit button) 'Villa', 'Day', 'Week', 'Month', 'Year' ) == $query

then echo "Duplicate entry not allowed"; // Basically don't add to database

else if

( $_POST 'Villa', 'Day', 'Week', 'Month', 'Year' ) dosen't match existing record then

$insert = "INSERT 'Villa', 'Day', 'Week', 'Month', 'Year' INTO $table

hopefully somebody can make head or tail of this explanation and help me out.

Cheers

thephpnewbie

Anybody?

dom_scott

What you're doing is not allowing to duplicate a combination of villa+date.
First, put your date in one field, a DATE field type in the database, it should be enough for that.
You could then go and select all the dates booked from Villa and make a check with PHP (the way you're doing it already) OR if you want to jump from newbie to newbie++ quickly then:

put one INDEX type = unique on Villa and Date columns - you could do it through phpMyAdmin or any other software you're using to access your database.

That will prevent the database from accepting any combination of those values that is already there.

Then you insert anyway and check if the MySQL inserted anything, if not, then check the last error code. I could go deeper in details and function names if you tell me which environment you're using... Zend_Framework / PDO database layer / mysqli functions