Doh! Another half hour wasted!
I just spend the better part of half an hour searching for a bug in my PHP scripts that update a MySQL database via an AJAX call. One of the fields in the database table is numeric, integer to be precise. When I tried to update the field with the value 228, the database would always change the value to 127. Why? All the other queries worked correctly. The field happily accepted a 48, a 85 and a 126. But the 228 always turned out as a 127.
Of course, it’s a late Friday afternoon and technically I should be doing more mundane things like writing a blog post, doing my timesheets or having a beer or two. But instead I was stuck with this issue. Just fix this issue and the scripts were good to go! Just this one tiny problem. Must be a typo somewhere in the PHP script. Or is jQuery somehow tinkering with the input field value before the form data is being sent? What could it be? What, what, what?!?
Then, all of a sudden, something made click and I couldn’t avoid a solid facepalm. I checked the database setup and found that the numeric type for the field was set to “tinyint” instead of “smallint”. And as we all should know unsigned tinyint’s maximum value is 127. Everything greater than that will be “rounded” to 127.
Now the field type is correctly set to “smallint” and my script is working. I just wish I could get that wasted half hour back and use it for mundane things like writing a blog post about those little blackouts that often cost too much time.
Oh well, time for a beer…
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