Question

I had a hard time coming up with a title, so I hope this is somewhat understandable…

I have the following table:

items:  id|name|...|visibleItems

E.g. it contains:

 1|test1|...|2
 2|test2|...|1
 3|test3|...|2

This is then joined with another table (customers) and I would like to list it as follows:

 cust1|test1|...
 cust2|test1|...
 cust3|test2|...
 cust4|test3|...
 cust4|test3|...

…thus using the ‘visibleItems’ as the number for items listed.

The SQL I have is something simple like:

SELECT [values] FROM [tables] WHERE [statements] ORDER BY name

Does this make sense? If so, what to do? 🙂

Answer 1

Do you have a customer_id foreign key in the items table? If so, you could do something like this:

SELECT customers.name AS customer_name, item.name AS item_name FROM customers
INNER JOIN items ON items.customer_id=customers.id;

visibleItems wouldn’t control how many customers are listed per item–the foreign key relationship and join would do that.

See here for a decent explanation of the various join types: A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins.