Preventing duplicates during entry

[mysty]

Now that I have the dupe issue working well (see my other thread entitled "Help in displaying duplicates in database") I have discovered that I have over 3,200 duplicates.  Some with 2 and some with 3 or more.  What I would like to do now is to prevent the dupes from being entered.  So, is there a way (or what is the best way) to get a popup or error message that there is already a database row with the same firsname AND lastname entry?

[paul2463]

yes, run a query on the database that checks for the said rows

<?php

$query = "SELECT idrow FROM table WHERE info is something";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$num = mysq_num_rows($result); //will be either 0 if its not there or more than zero if it is


if($num > 0) { //checks for an entry ?>

<strong>Data Already exists </strong>

<?php } ?>

 

hope that makes sense

[fenway]

Depends how you want to handle this... an unique index prevents the duplicate... but there are many different unique humans with the same name...?!?!