Question

I have an IF NOT EXISTS statement. IF it doesn’t exist an INSERT statement follows. IF EXISTS I need to understand what is/can be returned so that I can interpret it with PHP.

so:

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT id FROM users WHERE lname='SMITH')
INSERT INTO users (lname='SMITH')

I thought that the negative would return no result so could use a standard

if ($result){echo "record added";}
else {echo "duplicate - no record added";}

But that’s not what’s happening and I’m not sure how to achieve what I need – any suggestions?

Thank you for your kind attention.

Answer 1

In both cases $result would return the response for a successfully run command and nothing more. INSERT doesn’t yield any rows, and neither does an IF statement that doesn’t have a matching condition.

You can use SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY() if you want to retrieve the inserted ID, and then you can check if $result has returned a row.