Question

MySQL/PHP:

For a query with multiple statements, which deletes rows in four different tables, I want to know the combined number of affected rows. The PHP manual says I’ll only get the result from the last ‘operation’, which suggests it will only tell me how many rows were affected by the last of the DELETE statements.
How to get around this?

$deleteContactSQL = "DELETE FROM `persons` WHERE `persons`.`id` = '$person' AND `owner = '$user' AND `userOrContact` = 'contact';
             DELETE FROM `tabs` WHERE `person` = '$person' AND `ownerIdentity` = '$user' AND `selfOrOther` = 'other';
             DELETE FROM `tabAccess` WHERE `person`= '$person' AND `givenToIdentity` = '$user';
             DELETE FROM `personAccess` WHERE `viewedPerson` = '$person' AND `viewerIdentity` = '$user';
             ;";
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/goalview/includes/db.inc.php';
$deleteContacts = mysqli_query($link, $deleteContactSQL);
$success = mysqli_affected_rows($link);

Answer 1

Something like this maybe?

include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/goalview/includes/db.inc.php';

$sql = array();
$sql[] = "DELETE FROM `persons` WHERE `persons`.`id` = '$person' AND `owner = '$user' AND `userOrContact` = 'contact';"
$sql[] = "DELETE FROM `tabs` WHERE `person` = '$person' AND `ownerIdentity` = '$user' AND `selfOrOther` = 'other';"
$sql[] = "DELETE FROM `tabAccess` WHERE `person`= '$person' AND `givenToIdentity` = '$user';"
$sql[] = "DELETE FROM `personAccess` WHERE `viewedPerson` = '$person' AND `viewerIdentity` = '$user';"

$aff_rows = 0;

foreach($sql as $current_sql)
{
 $deleteContacts = mysqli_query($link, $current_sql); 
 $aff_rows = $aff_rows + mysqli_affected_rows($link);
}