Question

I am currently working on a project where people write articles, which are stored in a database. The credit for the article is stored as [USER ID]:Role and then loaded into the page by loading the user information from another table using the USER ID then implementing the role into the credit.

For example: 1:Writing would produce Brad - Writing

But as there are multiple credits per page they will be stored in the same column separated by a comma. For example: 1:Writing,4:Images,8:Music which would then appear as

Brad - Writing
Ben - Images
Jay - Music

To do this I am exploding the contents of the column with the separator , and then running a foreach(); on the array.

In this foreach(); I need to look up the ID’s of the users then load the information from the table and then include the Role as well in the credit.

I can’t think of the best way to do this. Would I need to run a preg_replace to run a separate function to get the information or would there be another way to do it? Or would there even be a better way to store the information in the database?

Thanks in advance, Brad.

Answer 1

You can store them in MySQL in a separate table

article_id   user_id   role
---------------------------
Brad       | 1       | Writing

and then issue a query like this

SELECT u.name, ac.role FROM article_credits ac 
    LEFT JOIN users u ON ac.user_id = u.id
    WHERE ac.article_id = ?

Or you can extract it from your current field using preg_match to catch all user_ids and feed them to

SELECT * FROM users WHERE users.id IN (' . implode(',', $user_ids).')'