Question

Not sure how to describe my problem, but lets try..

I am working on a small news portal php + mysql project
I have two tables in mysql database.

1: news (
   n_id (primary key)
   n_title
   n_text
)

2: news_image (
   ni_id (primary key)
   n_id  (foreign key from news table)
   ni_name
   ni_caption
)

(n_ prefix is for new and ni_ is prefix for news_image)

news table will hold the news story and news_image table will store the names and captions for the images of the news. separate table for news images is because on later stage, i will be adding more than one images for each story. the script works fine (as i have tested it by entering data in data base through phpmyadmin.

Problem:
I created a php script to add data to news table and to upload images to file system. it works fine. I used this query to add row to news table

INSERT INTO news
SET
n_title = '$title',
n_text = '$text'

n_id is the primary key (integer and is AUTO_INCREMENT).. this works fine but I want a query that will execute just after the execution of above query and will automatically insert a new row in news_image table, taking n_id of the row that has just been inserted in news table. ni_name and ni_capption in news_image table is not a problem, I can get it easily but getting the n_id from news table of the newly inserted row is the problem… How can I get n_id…????? Please provide a detailed answer as I am newbie to php + mysql..
Thanks for reading…waiting for reply..

Answer 1

Have you tried getting the ID of the last inserted news item? Like:

$lastItemID = mysql_insert_id();

Then you can use it to create the entry for the image:

INSERT INTO news_image
SET
n_id= '$lastItemID',
ni_name = '$name',
ni_caption  = '$caption'