Question

I got this piece of function that updates an account with 1 or 0,
note that the account_status has a data type of boolean.

I understand that $this->db->query(); returns TRUE or FALSE in write queries,

but i am having trouble, because when i tried to put a non boolean value on account_status, still the response is success, but obviously it will not update because the data is not boolean.

public function approve_account($id='0'){
        if($id == '0' OR $id== ''){
            return FALSE;
        }else{
            try{
                $id = (int)htmlentities($id,ENT_COMPAT,'UTF-8');
                $sql= "UPDATE elibrary.elib_user_account e 
                       SET account_status = 'hg' 
                       WHERE t_user_id = ?
                       LIMIT 1;";

                if($this->db->query($sql,$id) === TRUE){
                    echo 'sucess';
                }else{
                    echo 'FAIL';
                }
            }catch(Exception $e){
                echo $e;
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

MySQL does not have a native boolean type, booleans are represented as tinyint(1). Storing string values in a numeric column would coerce them to a numeric value — in your case, the string 'hg' is not a valid integer, and is coerced to the value 0, which is stored in the account_status column and further interpreted as false. If your string contains a valid number, e.g. '5', it would be stored as the integer value 5, which is considered true for boolean operations.