Stumbling blocks – things that happen that get in the way of you progressing and can, if you let them, defeat you!

I Never say Die – and I’ll battle any technical issue I come across until I succeed. But it’s how you get there that’s poked it’s head up.

Writing the Ultimate Membership Script.

I got it into my head that it’s time to settle down, pick a project and actually finish it.  So I did – I’m currently working on a new directory, membership site with all the bells and whistles I can think up. I’ve even gone down the path of documenting everything in a manner of ways which I’ll discuss in upcoming posts.

But what happened was this…. I’ve been starting scripts for sometime and I’m a great fan of using a PHP Framework called CodeIgniter. Now CodeIgniter is a nice elegant solution to providing the nuts and bolts to any system.  The only problem is, it’ll let you do anything and this is where people can get stuck. Again that’s for other upcoming posts.

I was merrily coding away, over coming other little stumbling blocks, ( finally solved my templating issues at long last – YEAH!!!!) and getting back into the swing when it came time to start creating the MySQL Stored Procedures.

Now, I’ve done this before in great and elaborate detail and so it was only a matter of copying and making slight modifications to get them to work in the new setup. BUT when it came time to create them in my neat little “MySQL Query Browser” Program ( available for Windows and Linux ) it refused to create them. WHAT!!!! This used to work fine.

So a mad search of Google on the subject led to lots of forums and sites with lots of – try this and the oh too common – “I’m having the same problem – help”.

The main problem is actually figuring out what the problem is. After hours of reading and getting confused I decided to take the extraordinary step of opening up a OpenOffice Writer Document ( you can use what ever you prefer ) and started writing up what I was doing – the results, that showed the problem and what I tried. Which in the end got my brain in order leading me to finally solve the mystery of the “Not working MySQL stored procedure creating process”.

The benefits of doing this are two fold.

1. You get a clearer picture of what wasn’t happening and
2. Let’s you document the solution.

Which gives you material for a future blog post or an E-Book.

I won’t bore you with what happened here but it was a matter of MySQL being upgraded on my system and not correctly setting itself up.

The moral of the story.

Step back, write down what’s happening and work through it systematically. It’ll lead you to a solution a whole lot faster.

Of course this doesn’t only apply to “head scratching over my something that used to work and stopped working” problems. It could be any problem.

Remember that others are after solutions to problems, so if you get into the habit of writing down the problem, working through it and detailing what you did, you’ll have something you can refer to forever but best of all, you’ll have something you can give to others.

One Final Note

I certainly consider it – nettiquete (probably spelled  wrong)  – to acknowledge those that help you out. Especially on Forums.

If someone has gone to the trouble to post a solution that solves your problem, tell them so and thank them. There’s another topic I’ll need to write about soon.

Cheers

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