Question

I have a table in my MySQL database which contains records of activity. It looks like:

Action_______________Date_________________User________________Location___________Ref Number  
Action 1........1/1/2012.........J Jones.......Home.............00123  
Action 2........2/1/2012.........K Smith.......Work.............00234  
Action 2........2/1/2012.........J Jones.......Home.............00123  
Action 1........4/1/2012.........B Smith.......Home.............00345  
Action 3........5/1/2012.........J Jones.......Mobile...........00123  
ETC  

What I am looking for is a query that will go through the table, find the first occurrence of Action 1and then go and find Action 2 for the same Ref Number and the Action 3 etc.

It would do this for each occurrence of the Ref Number in the table.

These would need to be presented in PHP as a single data line ie:

Ref No._____________Act1date_____________Act1User_____________Act1location_____________Act2date_____________Act2User__etc  
00123..........1/1/2012..........J Jones............Home....................2/1/2012..........J Jones
00234..........1/1/2012..........J Jones............Work....................2/1/2012..........J Jones  00345..........1/1/2012..........J Jones............Home....................2/1/2012..........B Smith  

There will also be some calculations to be done ie time differences between Action1_date and Action2_date etc.

I can’t think how to write a query to do this – can anyone help?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

Just use an order by statement to sort the results.

select
    action,
    Date,
    User,
    Location,
    refNumber
from
    yourTable
order by
    refNumber,
    action