PHP Laravel Says I Am Inserting Null But Function Should Return String

Question

I am generating customer IDs for each customer after they make an order in a Laravel 5 application. What follows is the code to generate an ID for the customer, which is composed of part of their first name, last name, and if this renders a duplicate, a random string is appended.

$ID = strtolower(substr($itemsP['firstName'],0,2) . $itemsP['lastName']);

function checkforduplicateID($iD,$firstName,$lastName)
{
    $f = $firstName;
    $l = $lastName;
    $orders = Order::where('customerID',$iD)->get()->count();

    if($orders>0)
    {
        $ID = strtolower(substr($firstName,0,2) . $lastName . substr(md5(rand()),0,2)); 
        checkforduplicatecode($ID,$f,$l);
    } 
    else 
    {
        return $iD; 
    }
}

$sessionOrder->customerID = checkforduplicateID($ID,$itemsP['firstName'],$itemsP['lastName']);
$sessionOrder->save();

On the first go around (no duplicate) this works perfectly. But as soon as I have two customers with the same first and last name, the function returns a null rather than the same ID with an appended (and random) string.

So I am getting an integrity violation on the second to last line because I am inserting a null into my database.

Something is obviously wrong with my checkforduplicateID function, but I can't figure out what.

Please assist.

Dave Thomas · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-03 02:20:32Z

1

I believe that here

if($orders>0) {
    $ID = strtolower(substr($firstName,0,2) . $lastName . substr(md5(rand()),0,2));
    checkforduplicatecode($ID,$f,$l);
} else {

you need to return the new ID like this:

if($orders>0) {
    $ID = strtolower(substr($firstName,0,2) . $lastName . substr(md5(rand()),0,2));
    return checkforduplicateID($ID,$f,$l);
} else {

edited Nov 3, 2016 at 2:20

Dave Thomas

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answered Nov 3, 2016 at 0:56

WEBjuju

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5 Comments

Summer Developer Over a year ago

I don't think that is correct, if there is more than zero matching orders nothing should be returned because the function needs to run again until no orders match, -and then- return the ID.

WEBjuju Over a year ago

you're not looping like that...what does checkforduplicatecode() do? is that supposed to call the same function? even so, you'll need to return what it produces.

WEBjuju Over a year ago

assuming that checkforduplicateID() was the intended self looping structure, i updated the solution.

Summer Developer Over a year ago

Ah thank you. Did not realize I needed to return like that to get it to loop like I wanted. tips hat

WEBjuju Over a year ago

tips hat in return

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