Hi all, i 've been looking for better way to do this so here it is...

BACKGROUND
I have this program here that inserts a new employee to my Oracle table. As you can see below i am filling my variables with parameters passed from a different program and using a "filtering" sub that i found on line to take out the (')s.
And all of this is forking fine but...
PROBLEM
Here's whats wrong:
There are two concerns that i have, but you may find more that need attention.:
QUESTION_ONE
Before i insert any record i need to make sure that an employee with that particular "employee_number" does not exist. And if it does exist, print a message on the browser that it exists. If not go ahead and insert and print confirmation.

what would be the best way? should i use SQL like selec count(*) or use the DBI $sth->rows. A good conditional insert example would definately help.

QUESTION_TWO
Look at the sub called "filter", this is something that i saw a guy use on-line. But, DBI has a thing called $sql = $dbh->quote($string); that can take care of unwanted charachters in your program (e.g, ", ' ) but i saw this used for the SQL rather than to take care of variables. By the way, if i end up using the filter subroutine, it need to take care of "(double-quotes) also. Is there a way i can use DBI-quote() to handel problem characters or should i just modify the filter subroutine to check for (") also.

Here is what i have so far

use DBI;
$DSN  = "dbi:Oracle:host=localhost;sid=essinv;port=1521";
$user = "username";
$pw   = "password";
$dbh  = DBI->connect($DSN,$user,$pw, { RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 
+1})
    || die "Cannot connect: $DBI::errstr\n" unless $dbh;


# get params & set variables
my $employee_number                = &filter(param('employee_number'))
+;
my $last_name                      = &filter(param('last_name'));
my $first_name                     = &filter(param('first_name'));


print header ();

eval{
  $SQL = "INSERT INTO EMPLOYEE (
              EMPLOYEE_NUMBER, FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME, INFORMATION_DATE
+)
              VALUES ('$employee_number', '$last_name', '$first_name',
+ SYSDATE)";
  $sth = $dbh->prepare($SQL);
}; # End of eval

# Check for errors.
if($@){
  $dbh->disconnect;
  print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
  print "An ERROR occurred! $@\n<P>";
  exit;
} else {
  $sth->execute;
} # End of if..else



## Filter - Gets rid of characters that screw up the program.
sub filter{
  $_[0]=~s/\'/\\\'/g;
  return $_[0];
} # End of filter subroutine


# Disconnect from the database
$sth->finish;
$dbh->disconnect;

[download]

Thanks ...

In reply to DBI conditional insert (and things of those nature) by data67

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