Is this the right way to increment multiple columns?

If so, why doesn't it work.

[HughMungus]

This looks to me as if it should work to display a list of items in a database, then update a field named "views" for each one (to record the number of views/day or whatever).

Edit: I just found out that I had a typo. But the question remains: is this the "right" way?

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql_whatever))
{
if ($row[type] == "Something")
{
echo ''.$row[pretext].'<A HREF="/?a='.$row[id].'">'.$row[anchor].$row[tracker].'</A> <BR><BR>';
$sql_views="UPDATE aff SET views = views + 1 WHERE id = '$row[id]'";
if(!mysql_query($sql_views)) die(mysql_error());
}
}

[hughie]

I would say that is a decent way to do it.
bear in mind that Mysql is a lot faster fetching from the database than updating it. If you have to do a lot of
"$sql_views="UPDATE aff SET views = views + 1 WHERE id = '$row[id]'"; "
in each page (and your traffic is high) you could look at re-building it to put less stress on the server.

Not quite sure how to though ;-)

hughie

[dmorison]

It would probably make more sense to do the views increment in one go, using the same WHERE clause as you used to select the original products to view.

For example:

$where = "widget_type='BLUE'"; 
$sql = "SELECT * FROM aff WHERE $where"; 
// execute $sql and display results as per your code, and then: 
$sql = "UPDATE aff SET views = views + 1 WHERE $where"; 
// execute update SQL 

This way, you're only doing 2 hits on the database instead of (n+1) where n is the number of products returned.