MySQL – How to enter a record with only whitespace “ ”

Below is my final working solution. It turns out that moving this...

date_modified = (CASE
                WHEN name <> values(name)
                OR description <> values(description)
                OR status <> values(status)
                OR type <> values(type)
                OR priority <> values(priority)
                  THEN UTC_TIMESTAMP()
                  ELSE date_modified
            END),

to the top of the list, above these fields...

name='$name',
description='$description',
status='$status',
priority='$priority',
type='$type',

So the final solution looks like this below...

$sql = "
    INSERT INTO
        $this->tasksDbTableName(task_id, project_id, name, description, status, priority, type, date_entered, date_modified, sort_order, heading)
    VALUES
        ('$taskId', '$projectId', '$name', '$description', '$status', '$priority', '$type', UTC_TIMESTAMP(), UTC_TIMESTAMP(), '$sort_order', '$heading')
    ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
        date_modified = (CASE
            WHEN name <> values(name)
            OR description <> values(description)
            OR status <> values(status)
            OR type <> values(type)
            OR priority <> values(priority)
              THEN UTC_TIMESTAMP()
              ELSE date_modified
        END),
        name='$name',
        description='$description',
        status='$status',
        priority='$priority',
        type='$type',
        sort_order='$sort_order',
        heading='$heading'";

Just moving my CASE Statement to the top above the other set fields, made it start working correctly!

It almost seems as if these DB column fields name description status priority type were getting Updated before my Case statement could run which resulted in them always appearing to be the same as the DB fields and never any different so my Case statement was about useless. Moving it to the top, it now works 100% correctly.

Hopefully this will help someone with a similar problem someday as many people across 3 sites tried to fix it without success. Just moving it to the top did the trick though so the Order in this case very much matters! ] Thanks to all that have contributed their time to try and find a solution, I always appreciate the help I receive on the StackExchange network sites!

It has to do with the max_allowed_packet on the MySQL server. It was set to 16M and when I upped it to 64M in my.cnf located in /private/etc/ (on Mac El Capitan) which was a copy of the my-huge.cnf. After stopping the MySQL server and Apache and restarting them made my site work locally again and the error messages went away.