CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqlinsertunique-key
bbe
bbe

Reputation: 344

Mysql insert, if duplicate value on unique key, insert a different value

Is it possible, when inserting a row with unique field, to change the value that goes into unique field into something different in case of duplicate?

Situation: a user is adding a new article, which name cannot be duplicate. For some reason, the user types the name that already exists in the database.

If using "ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE" - previous record (with the same name as inserted) gets all new data in other fields (update occurs) - not good.

What is required is, on insert, if the field is unique, and there is a match in DB, change the value being inserted into something like "[DUPLICATE] name".

This will reveal the presence of duplicate and the user will just change the name (which, likely, was inserted as duplicate by error).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1134

Answers (1)

twodee
twodee

Reputation: 616

You have to do something like (using prepared statements with mysqli)-

 SELECT name FROM table WHERE name=?

Bind the variable (I am assuming $articleName) and store the result, then check if there is a match with mysqli_num_rows().

If there exists one or more rows, rename the article name. 

 $articleName=$articleName."[DUPLICATE]";

Then insert into the db.

Note: There will usually be no same article names, because a sentence can be constructed in a many ways. Consider building a very smart program to detect that or manually check like they do in SO.

Upvotes: 1

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