Question

Evening, im not sure on what im asking here but I will try to explain. I’m not the best at SQL but I do try…

SELECT 
    qu.job_id, qu.engineer_id, qu.id AS `quote_id`, 
    jb.author, jb.image_ref, jb.job_title 
FROM 
    `ecom_quotes` qu, `ecom_jobs` jb 
WHERE 
    jb.author = 1 
AND 
    qu.job_id = jb.image_ref
GROUP BY 
    jb.image_ref

I used the above to list jobs posted by a user and getting other information from other tables based on the job id.

The problem being that if a job has no quotes posted for it, it does not display (qu.job_id = jb.image_ref).

So as a quick fix ( or so I thought ) i replaced it with

( ( qu.job_id = jb.image_ref ) OR ( jb.image_ref != '' ) )

which did work but it returns a quote id when there is no quote associated with it.

Is there anything i can do?

Answer 1

You’ll want to use a LEFT JOIN.

This will still return a record for ecom_jobs even when there is no matching record in ecom_quotes.

EDIT: Switched the order of the tables…

SELECT 
    qu.job_id, qu.engineer_id, qu.id AS `quote_id`, 
    jb.author, jb.image_ref, jb.job_title 
FROM 
    `ecom_jobs` jb
    LEFT JOIN `ecom_quotes` qu ON qu.job_id = jb.image_ref
WHERE 
    jb.author = 1
GROUP BY 
    jb.image_re