MySQL - Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails

Question

This seems to be a common error, but for the life of me I can\'t figure this out.

I have a set of InnoDB user tables in MySQL that are tied together via foreign key;

Answer 1

Hope this will assist anyone having the same error while importing CSV data into related tables. In my case the parent table was OK, but I got the error while importing data to the child table containing the foreign key. After temporarily removing the foregn key constraint on the child table, I managed to import the data and was suprised to find some of the values in the FK column having values of 0 (obviously this had been causing the error since the parent table did not have such values in its PK column). The cause was that, the data in my CSV column preceeding the FK column contained commas (which I was using as a field delimeter). Changing the delimeter for my CSV file solved the problem.