Question

I have a 3 table tag system, topics, tags and tagtopic.

I now want to display the various tags for each topic as I display the topic. Since there are multiple tags for one topic, when I do the query below, I get multiple rows and the topic displays multiple times, once for each row. I don’t think I can use a groupby as I’m not doing anything mathematical with the columns. What I really would like would be for each topic, display the topic and then a list of tags for a post such as (for Siri), ‘iphone,smartphone,Siri’.
tables:

topics
id | name |userid
tags
id | topicid | topicname
tagtopic
id | tagid | topicid '

$sql = "SELECT * FROM `topics` t
LEFT JOIN `tagtopic` tagtopic
on t.id = tagtopic.topicid
WHERE t.id= '12'";

Should mention that display is done with while($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) so that it is displaying the rows of the recordset. I would like it to display the topic once, but since there are multiple rows created for the tags, it is displaying multiple times.

Do I have to give up on the join and do a subquery? Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

You can do a GROUP_CONCAT which will put all the tags into a single field separated by a comma.

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(tt.tagid) FROM topics t
JOIN tagtopic tt ON tt.topicid = t.topicid
WHERE t.id=12
GROUP BY t.id