Question

I have a successful query that currently returns all data except for one table. The last table contains meta data where it is a one to many relationship (one product, multiple records with related data).

Is there a way to append a field with a value to the end of an existing query so that I can still access the record set in PHP with a mysql_fetch_array() command?

essentially I want to query for any records with the product ID, and then append multiple additional fields.

After thinking about it i was actually wondering if I can include an array within the records set (i.e. the array of results for the meta data) and access that through PHP?

Working Query:

SELECT offers.*, c.short_name AS sponsorName, c.logo AS sponsorLogo 
FROM offers LEFT JOIN sponsors AS c ON c.id=offers.sponsor ORDER BY end_date ASC

Results:

ID: 43875
category: 1
state: CO
city: Denver
zip: 80221
sponsor: 1
title: The coolest thing ever
duration: 2 years
price: 10
frequency:: Month

Second query that gets the right meta data-

SELECT mo.`name` AS meta_value FROM offer_metas 
LEFT JOIN meta_options AS mo ON mo.id = offer_metas.meta_option 
WHERE offer_id='48735' ORDER BY meta_option ASC

results:

meta_value:
'5-10 tickets'
'General Admission'

I want to add those two fields to the record up top .. but don’t know how to append all fields within a query result into a single already existing record.

–SOLVED–

Query has been adjusted to account for GROUP_CONCAT as follows

SELECT
offers.*,
s.short_name AS sponsorName,
s.logo AS sponsorLogo,
GROUP_CONCAT( mn.title) titles,
GROUP_CONCAT( mo.`name`) metas
FROM offers
LEFT JOIN sponsors AS s ON s.id = offers.sponsir
INNER JOIN offer_metas ON offer_metas.offer_id = offers.id
INNER JOIN meta_options as mo ON offer_metas.meta_option = mo.id
INNER JOIN meta_names as mn ON mo.category = mn.category AND mo.cat_seq = mn.seq
ORDER BY end_date ASC

data results looked good including 2 fields called “titles” and “metas” that looked like this

titles: 'Number of Tickets,Purchased Seats'
metas: '5-10,General Administration'

now THOSE .. I can work with in PHP .. and since they have the same number of elements i’ll just parse them into an array i can better work with 🙂

Answer 1

Further to your comments above, it sounds like GROUP_CONCAT() will give you what you’re after. It won’t return the meta_values as an array, but rather as a string (e.g. with each value separated by <br/> in order that they can be emitted directly as HTML):

SELECT
  offers.*,
  c.short_name AS sponsorName,
  c.logo AS sponsorLogo,
  GROUP_CONCAT(mo.name ORDER BY meta_option ASC SEPARATOR '<br/>') AS meta_values
FROM
  offers
  LEFT JOIN sponsors     AS c  ON c.id       = offers.sponsor
  LEFT JOIN offer_metas  AS o  ON o.offer_id = offers.id
  LEFT JOIN meta_options AS mo ON mo.id      = offer_metas.meta_option
ORDER BY end_date ASC;

Note that, if you need to escape the meta values for any HTML they might contain, you’ll need to choose a different separator (perhaps U+001E, INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO?) and have PHP replace that separator with suitable HTML after escaping any contained HTML.