Question

This may be simple to solve but I’m having trouble with this piece of code – I’m a self taught newbie with PHP, and the code I’ve come up with doesn’t seem to want to work.

The pages are for an online entry system for a sports competition. Judges’ details are stored in table “club_judges”, and users can enter them into a competition by copying them into “competition_judges”. This is done via a checkbox form in a table.

I want to add functionality whereby judges who are already added to the competition do not appear in the import form, however my code does not seem to work. I am using a unique field of “bg_number” (the sport’s identification number) to search for an existing entry.

Current code:

$existing_judges = mysql_query("SELECT bg_number FROM competition_judges WHERE competition='Test Competition'");
$existing_judges_fetch = mysql_fetch_array($existing_judges);
$existing_judges_array = "('" . implode( "', '", $existing_judges_fetch ) . "');" ; 

$query = "SELECT * FROM club_judges WHERE (`club`='Test Club') AND (`bg_number` NOT IN '$existing_judges_array') ORDER BY name ";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

Error displayed:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ''('1234567', '1234567');') ORDER BY name' at line 1

For reference 1234567 is the bg_number for my test judge.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

why dont u use just one query

SELECT * 
FROM club_judges 
WHERE `club`='Test Club' 
AND `bg_number`
NOT IN (SELECT bg_number FROM competition_judges WHERE competition='Test Competition')
ORDER BY name