Question

Does drupal have a simple version for reading like drupal_write_record. I want to read a record from a table called {allcategories} and find the record that has a category field of value computers. It’s a custom table defined with schema.

Answer 1

What you’re looking for doesn’t really exist in Drupal 6. drupal_write_record just barely made it into Drupal 6. In Drupal 7, the database API itself makes this straightforward enough that I wouldn’t expect another abstraction layer like “drupal_read_record”:

$record = db_select('allcategories') // table
    ->condition('category', 'computers') // field & value
    ->execute() // do it
    ->fetch(); // get the result