Question

With the following piece of code, how do i know that anything was inserted in to the db?

if ($stmt = $connection->prepare("insert into table (blah) values (?)")) {
$stmt->bind_param("s", $blah);  
$stmt->execute();           
$stmt->close();                                 
}

I had thought adding the following line would have worked but apparently not.

if($stmt->affected_rows==-1){$updateAdded="N"; echo "failed";}  

And then use the $updatedAdded=”N” to then skip other pieces of code further down the page that are dependent on the above insert being successful.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The execute() method returns a boolean … so just do this :

if ($stmt->execute()) { 
   // it worked
} else {
   // it didn't
}

Update: since 2022 and beyond, a failed query will throw an error Exception. So you won’t have to write any code to "skip other pieces of code further down the page" – it will be skipped automatically. Therefore you shouldn’t add any conditions and just write the code right away:

$stmt = $connection->prepare("insert into table (blah) values (?)");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $blah);  
$stmt->execute();           

If you need to do something in case of success, then just do it right away, like

echo "success";

You will see it only if the query was successful. Otherwise it will be the error message.