Question

I am currently using RedBean for ORM in my models.

I need to insert data into a MySQL table where one of the columns is set to unique.

Currently, data is inserted via a form like so:

//Create
$object = R::dispense('object');

//Need to check if supplied name is a duplicate
$object->name = $name
$object->description = $description

//Save
R::store($object)

Now the problem is that if $name was not duplicated in the database, everything goes well. If it is a duplicate, I can catch the exception and get the SQL error code: 23000

If I echo the exception, I get:

[23000] - SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry 'abc' for key 'name_UNIQUE'

Another problem is that if I have multiple fields which are set to UNIQUE, the exception will only tell me the first field that’s duplicated. Therefore, in order to get the next field, I need to make sure the user corrects the first duplicate and run the query again.

This seems to be quite inefficient. I need to be able to check if the user has inserted duplicate data in multiple fields while not executing too many SQL statements.

What are some best practices for doing this? Also, what’s the best practice when it comes to returning whether the action was a success, or if on failure, why and which fields back to the controller?

Thank you 🙂

Answer 1

You must first perform a “select” to check that the unique entries do not already exist, there is no other way… If you do not want to perform multiple requests from you code, you can implement a stored procedure.

It allows you to perform multiple requests within the same transaction, and that limits the network overhead.

It will also allow you to manage multiple kinds of error (through error codes AFAIR), which will give you a way to identify clearly the problematic field.

Check out this link

Hope that helps !