Working with Database Tables in Your Plugins (Part 3)

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This post is the third part of a series on working with database tables in WordPress plugins. Read the first and second post before proceeding.

In the last post, I showed you how to retrieve data from a table, in this post I’m going to demonstrate how to insert, delete, and update data in a tables.

Insert Rows into Your Table

Putting data into your table is pretty simple. All you have to do is run a simple insert query with the $wpdb class.

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function insert_my_data()	{
	global $wpdb;
 
	$wpdb->insert( 'your_table_name', array( 
		'column1' => 'value1', 
		'column2' => 123 
		) 
	);
}

This function will insert “value1″ into “column1″, and “123″ into “column2″, and it will create a new row in which to store the column data.

Updating Rows in Your Table

Updating data in a table is just a little be more complicated than inserting because we have to tell WordPress which rows to update, but it’s still pretty simple.

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function update_my_data()	{
	global $wpdb;
 
	$wpdb->update( 'your_table_name', 
		array( 
			'column1' => 'value1', 
			'column2' => 123 
		),
		array(
			'ID' => 1
		)
 
	);
}

This function will update “column1″ and “column2″ in the row that has an ID of 1.

Deleting a Row from a Table

Deleting data is almost identical to updating: we have to specify which row to remove. The query function also looks a little different.

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function delete_my_data()	{
	global $wpdb;
 
	$wpdb->query(" DELETE FROM $wpdb->your_table_name WHERE ID = '1' ");
}

This will delete the row that has an ID of 1.

Anything not making sense or working? Ask! Getting a good hold of these techniques will greatly improve your plugin development skills.

Enjoy!

About Pippin Williamson

Pippin Williamson is an expert WordPress dev with 4+ years of experience. You may follow him on Twitter @pippinspages and @pippinsplugins and see his free WP plugins, themes, and tutorials he has to offer at Pippin's Pages.com and Pippin's Plugins.com

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