$query = "UPDATE ip_location SET primary_ip = ?, loc_id = ?, component_type_id = ? "
        . " WHERE primary_ip = ?";
    $vals = array($ip, $loc_id, $device_id, $original_ip);
    $types = array(‘text’, ‘integer’, ‘integer’, ‘text’);

 $sth = $db_conn->prepare($query, $types);

$result = $sth->execute($vals);

 If I omit the $types (it is an optional argument), I get an error about inserting text into an integer field.

The PEAR::DB library  (and the perl DBD modules) don’t require one to specify the $types.  I always thought that was one of the really nice aspects of coding in scripting languages that were looser with data types.  It’s going require quite a bit of coding to port from DB to MDB2 because of the $types issue.  I don’t suppose you’ve come across any way to have MDB2 do more of the work in this regard?

 Thanks,

Ethan  (ethan@ethanbrown.org)

You don’t have to specify datatypes. PEAR::MDB2 will detect the datatype of the variable you send to it and use that if you don’t provide a datatype. So if you have a string which contains a number, it’ll detect a string and fail.

You can get around this by manually typecasting e.g. by doing:

$vals = array($ip, (int)$loc_id, (int)$device_id, $original_ip); 

I’m actually using this method at the moment. It is a bit strange that MDB2 has this behavior in a weakly-typed programming language but that’s just the way it is.

I believe specifying the types actually keeps your code cleaner and makes it run faster so it may be worth going through all your code and specifying datatypes.