Question

i have 3 tables

crossarticle_article — Where article details are stored.

crossarticle_category — Where category details are stored.

crossarticle_articletocategory — Where article and category mappings are stored.. (this is because an article could exist in more than one category)

now i want to get the article based on the joins of all the three tables, but the problem is if i do that, i would get the repeated article title, as same article could be in more than one category, so no use of group by too. i need the crossarticle_category join because the category name exists in that table. and even if i skip that table, still crossarticle_articletocategory has the mapping for category and article. so still i would get repeated article title, can anyone suggest me some query so that i do not get repeated article titles.

****************************UPDATED QUESTION*************************

http://www.prosoundnetwork.com/uploadedImages/ProAudioReview/Forum/PAR_Forum/Sample2/sqlquery.png

you can right click and open in new window, to see the proper view, in the resultset you can see the titles are repeated.

Answer 1

Something like this will work:

  SELECT TOP 5 CA.Id AS ArticleID, CA.Title as ArticleTitle,
     stuff( (SELECT ', '+CC.Name
             FROM  CrossArticle_ArticleToCategory A2C 
             INNER JOIN CrossArticle_Category CC ON A2C.CategoryId = CC.Id
             WHERE A2C.ArticleId = CA.Id
             ORDER BY CC.Name
             FOR XML PATH ('')
            ), 1, 2, '') as Categories
  FROM CrossArticle_Article CA

This will give you one row per article with a comma list of categories.
It will look like this (I tested so it is correct):

ArticleID   Article Title              Categories 
5685        AlkjTechv                  Hardware
5684        Show Report...             Gear, News
5683        Radi-something introduces  Gear, News

I only have 3 answers because you only gave example data for 3 results.

As a side note: this is much faster than a custom aggregate.

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If what the categories are does not matter than a select like this will give you all the titles:

  SELECT TOP 5 CA.Id AS ArticleID, CA.Title as ArticleTitle,
  FROM CrossArticle_Article CA