Question

Suppose i have this db table schema:

id |      article          | slug
1    hey guys how are you?  hey-guys-how-are-you?

I’m trying keeping my db route field unique

route is always the message field camelized like this this-is-a-title-but-now-is-a-route

so inserting the same route produce a db error of duplicated key

so which is a good practice to control and insert always unique routes?

thanks

Answer 1

Because you’ve tagged CodeIgniter, I would suggest pre-checking the value of the slug field, then increment the value if need be. The CI string helper has a increment_string function that will take care of that for you.

increment_string()

Increments a string by appending a number to it or increasing the number. Useful for creating “copies” or a file or duplicating database content which has unique titles or slugs.

Usage example:

echo increment_string('file', '_'); // "file_1"
echo increment_string('file', '-', 2); // "file-2"
echo increment_string('file-4'); // "file-5"

So

this-is-a-route becomes this-is-a-route-1

and

this-is-a-route-1 becomes this-is-a-route-2

etc.