Question

I am stuck and I am trying to find a solution, so please help!

I have 3 tables:

Books (id, title, ...)

Authors (id, name, surname, ...)

book_authors (bookID, authorID, whatisdoing)

Now I want to retrieve all books depending on the title (user search) and all the other info (author name, surname). But, I want the book titles to be unique with only the first occurrence of the book_authors.whatisdoing to be shown.

In MS Access I achieved that with first function, but now first does not work and with min I didn’t get the results I want.

Any help would be appreciate.

The query in Access was:

SELECT 
    First(book_authos.whatisdoing) AS FirstOfidiothta_ID, 
    First(authors.name) AS onoma, 
    First(authors.surname) AS eponymo, 
    books.ID, books.title, books.photoLink
FROM (books 
INNER JOIN book_authors ON books.ID = book_authors.book_ID) 
INNER JOIN authors ON book_authors.author_ID = authors.ID 
GROUP BY 
    books.ID, books.titlos, books.photoLink, books.active 
HAVING 
    (((books.titlos) Like '%" & textString & "%') AND 
    ((books.active)=True) AND ((First(authors.active))=True)) 
ORDER BY 
    First(book_authos.whatisdoing), books.title

Answer 1

EDIT: Changed based on OP comments.
EDIT 2: Revised to correct flaws.

You might give this a try.

SELECT aba.name, aba.surname, aba.whatisdoing,
    b.ID, b.title, b.photoLink
FROM Books b
JOIN
    (
    SELECT ba.bookID, ba.whatisdoing, a.name, a.surname,
      ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY ba.bookID ORDER BY ba.whatisdoing) AS sequence
    FROM book_authors ba
    JOIN Authors a ON ba.authorID = a.id
    WHERE a.active = 1
    ) AS aba ON b.id = aba.bookID
WHERE b.title LIKE '%' + @textString + '%'
    AND b.active = 1
    AND aba.sequence = 1

The ROW_NUMBER function assigns a row number to the row based on the groups defined in the PARTITION BY clause and the order defined by the ORDER BY clause.

@textString is a SQL Server variable. I’m not sure how you would assign this in your situation.

The boolean data type is BIT in SQL Server and the values are 0 for false and 1 from true.