Question

I am trying to have a section in a shop I am creating to display 5 random products, from that Category ID.

Firstly every category has an ID, and a set of Sub Catrgories, every Sub Cat has an ID, and within every Sub Cat is a number of products. Every Product also has an ID.

The Products table contains the ProductID and the SubCatID.
The SubCat Table Contains the SubCatID and The CatID
The Cat table contains only the CatID.

SO I need to display 5 random products by the CatID. I can get random products using a query similar to this:

$randomprod = mssql_query("SELECT TOP 5* FROM Products WHERE SubCatID = '1' ORDER BY NEWID()");
while ($echorand = mssql_fetch_array($randomprod)) { 

I need a way to join the tables so I can display all products under a certain CatID however, and am finding it difficult because my Products table doesn’t contain a CatID. I am aware there are a number of joins, but am fairly new to PHP and even newer to MS SQL. Can anyone tell me what join is best, or point me in the correct direction please?

Answer 1

Join products to sub categories, join sub categories to categories, like this:

SELECT TOP 5 Products.Name, SubCatergory.Name, Category.Name
FROM Products
INNER JOIN SubCatergory ON Products.SubCatID = SubCatergory.SubCatID
INNER JOIN Catergory ON SubCatergory.CatID = Category.CatID
WHERE Category.CatID = 1
ORDER BY NEWID()

I have used INNER JOIN in the above example.