Question

I got a minor problem. To start, I have the following tables: ‘groups’, ‘pages’ and the junction table ‘subcriptions’

The idea behind this is that a group (with users) can subsribe to a page. An user can add a page as a subscription to the group he is in. (many-to-many). For information: An user can be in multiple groups.

As a part of the UI I want to make a list about that. From every group I want the associated pages. For example: (Group: … Pages: -…. , -…. | Group: … Pages: -…., -…. etc.)

The SQL query is not a issue:

SELECT Groups.name, pages.name, pages.id
FROM Groups
JOIN subscriptions ON groups.id = subscriptions.group_id
JOIN pages ON subscriptions.page_id = pages.id
WHERE groups.id IN ('1', '2')   // de values 1 & 2 zijn voorbeelden en stellen de groepen id's voor waarin de huidige gebruiker zit.

The result will, for example, look like this:

group name ---- page name ---- page id
group1 -------- page1 --------- 1
group1 -------- page2 --------- 2  
group2 -------- page1 --------- 1

My question is; how can I get a (html) list where I get a single group-name and all the associated pages to that group? (Like the example I mentioned earlier). I need a php solution. (I am using Zend framework, but I could not find a solution in Zend that does the trick I want)

Or do have to do a single query for every group? I would like to avoid that though..

I am new in this world of mysql and php so every help is worth allot! Thanks. 🙂

Answer 1

a very basic implementation would be the following:

• loop through mysql results
• build a 2-dimensional array with the group as your 1st and the associated pages as 2nd dimension
• in your html template, take your array and use an outer loop to go through your groups and an inner loop to get the pages per group

cheers 🙂