Question

I am hoping for some help making my queries more efficient if possible. I have two tables. One which contains the types of content available and another which contains content linked to the type table by a type id.

I am trying to select from the content table and group the results by type_id. I am currently using a query inside a loop to do this so it is selecting again from the second table for each type_id. Is there a better/more efficient way to do this?

Here are my current tables and queries:

type_id     type
  1        type 1
  2        type 2

id    title   type_id    content 
1      test1    1      test content 1
2      test2    2      test content 2
3      test3    1      test content 3



$query="select type_id, type from type_table";

foreach($query as $type){

$query="select title, content from content_table WHERE type_id=$type['type_id']";
}

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your example appears to select all possible values from the content table, albeit in batches of a given type at a time. So select title, content from content_table would surely do this whole thing in one go, without looping.

To put each type_id into a new div, you could do something like this:

SELECT title, content, t.type_id, t.type
FROM content_table c
JOIN type_table t ON t.type_id = c.type_id
ORDER BY t.type_id

// pseudo-code
prev_type_id = -1
print "<div>"
foreach row:
    if type_id != prev_type_id:
        prev_type_id = type_id
        print "</div><div>"
print "</div>"

(edited based on comments)