Question posted in 
I’ve built my first ever simple MySQL DB with the myPhpAdmin interface.
1st users table: id (PK), email, fname, lname, isConsultant [bool]…
2nd consultants table: id (PK), title, bio…
3rd table linking both (some users are consultants, some are not): id (PK), user_id (FK), consultant_id (FK).
I have Primary Key and Foreign Key well assigned (I’ve followed quite a few video tutorials).
Now when I test and try to insert values into my 3rd table, I see "duplicate" options offered to me by the myPhpAdmin interface:
What did I do wrong? Please if you could use simple wordings since I’m new to this!?
2
Answers
It looks like to me you inputted ‘1 – Law’ as a string to consultant_id, and ‘Law – 1’ as a string to consultant_id as well, those two strings are not the same, so of course they will not be duplicated….
phpMyAdmin shows these foreign key relations sorted both ways — by the key and by the referenced name. That makes it easy for you to insert data regardless of whether you know the id is 1 or the corresponding value is Law.
You haven’t done anything wrong, and it’s a little confusing at first, but this is working exactly as intended. You can use either from the dropdown to pick the same value; it will insert the ‘1’ regardless of whether you select "1 – Law" or "Law – 1".