Question

I am having problems with echoing the result from a sql query as links when using UNION ALL.

The tables looks like this:

TABLE: posts
id username date comment

TABLE: files
id username date file

The "file" row contains urls to uploaded files.

The code i have for displaying the results:

<?php
$sql="SELECT * FROM posts 
UNION ALL 
SELECT * FROM files 
ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 100";
$result=mysql_query($sql);
while($rows=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
?>

<div> <?php echo $rows['comment']; ?> </div>
<div> <a href="<?php echo $rows['file']; ?>"><?php echo $rows['file']; ?></a> </div>

<?php
}
?>

Now everything sorts out in the right order, but the filenames wont be displayed as links, only plain text.
There are no problems, echoing out the links if i run a query on the files table only.

I guess the big question is: How do you display the result from a UNION ALL query as links?

Answer 1

When you perform a UNION query, columns are combined meaning your comment and file columns will be the same, the resultset name of which will be comment (the first select statement). See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/union.html

I’d be more inclined to use two separate queries, one against the posts table and the second against files.