Question

I have 3 tables: projects, categories and projects_categories.

I want to get the project name, description and categories but there can be more than one category per project so i am getting duplicate content using the next query:

SELECT projects.name, projects.description, categories.name
FROM projects
JOIN projects_categories ON projects.project_id = projects_categories.project_id
JOIN categories ON projects_categories.category_id = categories.category_id
WHERE projects.project_id = ?

I am getting this:

++ name +++   ++ description ++    ++ name (category) ++
project1      bla bla bla          film
project1      bla bla bla          music

As u can see im getting two rows instead of one

Answer 1

Group_concat is the tag that you are looking for:

SELECT projects.name, 
       projects.description, 
       group_concat(categories.name SEPARATOR ' ') as category_name
FROM projects
JOIN projects_categories 
  ON projects.project_id = projects_categories.project_id
JOIN categories 
  ON projects_categories.category_id = categories.category_id
WHERE projects.project_id = ?
group by projects.name, projects.description