Question

I have a generic MySQL statement used for many tables that just retrieves all data for a single table:

$table = "profiles";//set static for example
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `$table`");

I would like the results to show the text from position in place of job_id.
How do I do this if I still want my query to remain generic and there could be multiple fields that are references to other tables where I would want the related text not the id?

mysql> show columns from profiles;
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field       | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| staff_id    | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment | 
| job_id      | int(11)      | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
| name        | varchar(100) | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

mysql> show columns from job_positions
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field       | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| job_id      | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment | 
| position    | varchar(100) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Is there some kind of relationship I can set on these fields and then issue a command with the query to return the related text instead of the id’s?

Answer 1

You can create a view:

create or replace view info as
select p.job_id as job_id, p.name as name, j.position as position
from profile as p, job_position as j where p.job_id=j.job_id

Then you can still using your query

$table = "info";
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `$table`");