Question

I’ve created a little weekly trivia game for my website. Basically its five questions, then at the end the user can add their score to a scoreboard.

The problem is that I want the scores to carry from week to week and cumulate. So let’s say you got 4 points one week, then 5 points the next. I want the scoreboard to reflect you have 9 points.

So I created a small form with an i
nvisible field that has the users score, a field for the username, and a field for the e-mail address. Next week, when the user takes the quiz again, I want their score to be updated if the username and e-mail match a record in the database. If no record does match, I want an entry to be created.

Here’s the script I came up with, however, it doesn’t work (which doesn’t surprise me, I’m pretty new to PHP/MySQL)

$name = $_POST['name']; //The Username
$score = $_POST['submitscore']; //The users score (0-5)
$email = $_POST['email'];//Users email address
$date = date("F j, Y, g:i a");//The date and time

if($name != '') {
    $qry = "SELECT * FROM scoreboard WHERE name='$name'";
    $result = mysql_query($qry);
    if($result) {
        if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
        $sum = ($row['SUM(score)']+$score);
        "UPDATE scoreboard SET score = '$sum' WHERE name = '$name'";
        }    
        else    
    $q = mysql_query("INSERT INTO scoreboard (`name`, `email`, `date`, `score`) VALUES ('$name', '$email', '$date', '$score');");
        @mysql_free_result($result);
    }
    else {
        die("Query failed");
    }
}

My table scoreboard looks like this

id……..name……..email………..date………..score

1……..J.Doe…[e-mail]…..7/27/11………4

Answer 1

You’re looking for INSERT... ON DUPLICATE KEY syntax

"INSERT INTO scoreboard (`name`, `email`, `date`, `score`) ".
   " VALUES ('$name', '$email', '$date', '$score') ".
"ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `score` = $sum";

Aside:

Use mysql_real_escape_string!

$name = mysql_real_escape_string( $_POST['name'] );
$score = mysql_real_escape_string( $_POST['submitscore'] );
$email = mysql_real_escape_string( $_POST['email'] );
$date = date("F j, Y, g:i a");//The date and time

EDIT

First, this doesn’t really work unless you have a column SUM(SCORE):

$sum = ($row['SUM(score)']+$score);

If you want the sum of a column, you need to put that in the MySQL query directly. If you just want the score for that row, however, you can use $row['score']. If you need to add to an existing score you don’t need to select for the value (thanks to a1ex07 for pointing this out)

ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `score` = $score + score