While working on a project for a “Make a Spotify Clone from Scratch: JavaScript PHP and MySQL” course that I’m learning, I encountered an issue with making a query to the database.

The task was to set user-provided data like username, name, email, etc. into the database table. But the query provided in the course didn’t work for me.

I’ve struggled a bit but managed to find a solution.

My setup:

1. MAMP version 6.8
2. PHP version 7.4.33
3. mySQL version 5.7.39

What I had:

1. The database was set via the phpMyAdmin tool.
2. There were 8 columns in the database’s users table.
3. The first column is id with a type of INT and has an AUTO_INCREMENT without any initial value.

Suggested query:

So when I used the provided query it didn’t work for me. The first parameter in the parenthesis is supposed to represent an id column.

mysqli_query($this->con, "INSERT INTO users VALUES ('', '$un', '$fn', '$ln', '$em', '$encryptedPw', '$date', '$profilePic')");

This query returned false. And after debugging as suggested in the course, I received the following error for the given query:

#1366 - Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'id' at row 1

So it means that the provided value type was wrong for the id column.

Solution:

After some of research I’ve found out that for the AUTO_INCREMENT columns, you can skip this parameter in the query.

So, you would set all columns except the first one (the id), and the final query would look like this:

mysqli_query($this->con, "INSERT INTO users (username, firstName, lastName, email, password, signUpDate, profilePic) VALUES ('$un', '$fn', '$ln', '$em', '$encryptedPw', '$date', '$profilePic')");