Question

I always struggle with joins within Access. Can someone guide me?

4 tables.

Contest (id, user_id, pageviews)
Users (id, role_name, location)
Roles (id, role_name, type1, type2, type3)
Locations (id, location_name, city, state)

Regarding the Roles table — type1, type2, type3 will have a Y if role_name is this type. So if “Regular” for role_name would have a Y within type1, “Moderator” for role-name would have a Y within type2, “Admin” for role_name would have a Y within type3. I didn’t design this database.

So what I’m trying to do. I want to output the following: user_id, pageviews, role_name, city, state.

I’m selecting the user_id and pageviews from Contest. I then need to get the role_name of this user, so I need to join the Users table to the Contest table, right?

From there, I need to also select the location information from the Locations table — I assume I just join on Locations.location_name = Users.location?

Here is the tricky part. I only want to output if type1, within the Roles table, is Y.

I’m lost!

Answer 1

As far as I can see, this is a query that can be built in the query design window, because you do not seem to need left joins or any other modifications, so:

SELECT Contest.user_id, 
       Contest.pageviews, 
       Roles.role_name, 
       Locations.city, 
       Locations.state
FROM ((Contest 
INNER JOIN Users 
ON Contest.user_id = Users.id) 
INNER JOIN Roles 
ON Users.role_name = Roles.role_name) 
INNER JOIN Locations 
ON Users.location = Locations.location_name
WHERE Roles.type1="Y"

Lots of parentheses 🙂