Question

Apologies – am not good at SQL. Perhaps this is a simple query – I don’t know.

What I have is a basic forum table – e.g.

id poster title type content postedon parentID

in this scheme, if a user asks a question, it is type = 0, and if it is an answer, type = 1. If the entry is an answer, I update the parentID to the id on the question row.

All I want to do is pull the questions in a SQL query, along with a number that has the total number of answers to the question – for e.g. a result row would look like

[e-mail] "how do I do this?" 4

Where (4) would be the total answers to my question. I want to do this in a single query – without having to pull the questions first, and then run repeated queries for each question Id to find the count of the answers.

How do I do this?

Thank you all,

(PS – is there a way to do the query in Linq expressions? I would do that instead of a stored procedure if I could)

Answer 1

select ft1.poster, ft1.title, count(ft2.id)
    from ForumTable ft1
        left join ForumTable ft2
            on ft1.id = ft2.parentID
                and ft2.type = 1
    where ft1.type = 0
    group by ft1.poster, ft1.title