Question

I am building a web application and have opted to use similar table and field names to WordPress in my application. By that I mean I have a users table and a usermeta table similar to how WordPress works.

Forgive me for making this question so big, I opted to be as descriptive as possible in this question.

The usermeta table has the following table values;

umeta_id
user_id
meta_key
meta_val

As an example I have the following data in my usermeta table;

user_id = 1
meta_key = first_name
meta_value = ‘dwayne

user_id = 1
meta_key = last_name
meta_value = charrington

In my users table I have the following example data;

ID = 1
user_login = admin
user_pass = ui3h423h4o82374
user_email = [e-mail]

Basically what I want to do is using the following join which seems to kind of work, sort of:

$db = $this->db;
$db->select('wolf_users.ID, wolf_usermeta.user_id AS ID', FALSE);
$db->select('wolf_users.user_login AS user_login', FALSE);
$db->select('wolf_users.user_email AS user_email', FALSE);
$db->select('wolf_users.user_status AS status', FALSE);
$db->select('wolf_usermeta.meta_key AS meta_key', FALSE);
$db->select('wolf_usermeta.meta_value AS meta_value', FALSE);
$db->from('wolf_users');
$db->join('wolf_usermeta', 'wolf_users.ID = wolf_usermeta.user_id', 'left');
$db->where('wolf_usermeta.user_id = wolf_users.ID');
$q = $db->get();
return $q->result_array();

Firstly: result_array seems to be returning duplicate data from my database (which is a bit strange) have I formatted my join incorrectly or is there something I am missing to prevent this? returning results just using $q->result() seems to stop duplicate data being returned.

I am using Dwoo for my templating and when I echo out the variable that is holding the data using print_r it shows no duplicate query content when using query, but shows duplicate content when using result_array (almost like it looped over the usermeta table a few times).

One of the pages I am using this database query on is a page that lists all clients in a database and then fetches matching data from the usermeta table. So my question is how do I access data from both tables and then display it in my application using a foreach in my view template?

Answer 1

You understand how joins work right?

By joining meta data to a user, the user will be repeated for each meta data entry you pull out.

This could be avoided with a foreach after pulling data out of the database or by splitting your query into two queries.

$user = $this->db
    ->select('ID, user_login, user_email, user_status AS status')
    ->where('ID', $id)
    ->get('wolf_users')
    ->row_array();

if(!$user)
{
    return FALSE;
}

$user['meta'] = $this->db
    ->select('meta_key, meta_value')
    ->where('user_id', $id)
    ->get('wolf_usermeta')
    ->result_array();

return $user;

A few general MySQL points and tips:

wolf_users.ID, wolf_usermeta.user_id AS ID

No need, you only need to select the user ID once. The second select will override the first, which is of course the same.

$db->select('wolf_usermeta.meta_value AS meta_value', FALSE);

You don’t need to do that, the table name will be removed from the result, so renaming them is pointless.

Good luck!