Question

I building a blog for school i would like to display the count of comments for each thread made. However I’m a bit lost to how to achieve this goal any help would be great thank you!

i have 2 tables

CREATE TABLE `blog_message` (
  `MessageID` int(30) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `Username` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
  `Message` text,
  `AddedDate` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `Title` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`MessageID`)
)


CREATE TABLE `blog_comments` (
  `CommentID` int(30) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `MessageID` int(30) DEFAULT NULL,
  `Author` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  `CommentMessage` text,
  `AddedDate` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`CommentID`),
  KEY `blog_comments_ibfk_1` (`MessageID`),
  CONSTRAINT `blog_comments_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`MessageID`) REFERENCES `blog_message` (`MessageID`)
)

my goal is

to display in a gridview

int a table format
Comment count | title | Username | Date of creation

Answer 1

The following is MySQL syntax, not sure what you’re using. But this will return a list MessageIds and the number of comments they have.

----------------------------
| MessageId | comment_count|
----------------------------
| 1234      | 34           |
----------------------------

SELECT bm.MessageId, count(bc.CommentId) as comment_count
FROM blog_comments bc, blog_message bm
WHERE bm.MessageId = bc.MessageId
GROUP BY bm.MessageId

If you want the Author and AddedDate just add it to the SELECT statement (i.e. SELECT bm.MessageId, count(bc.CommentId) as comment_count, bm.AddedDate, bm.Author).