Question

I have a (what I am hoping to be easy) problem with a MySQL query.

I have 2 tables: articles, comments

An article can have many comments so there is a foreign of article_id in the comments table.

I want to get all the articles and while loop them to show on the page and then get all the comments count for each article. Easy, this is done. Now the problem is I want to sort the results based on number of comments but still show the results in the same way.

So basically I want to:

SELECT *
FROM tbl_articles
JOIN tbl_comments
ORDER BY (the most comments);

I am hoping this can all be done in a single query as the entire query is build dynamically from multiple sets of checkboxes where a single query could look like:

SELECT *
FROM tbl_articles
WHERE subject IN (1,2,5)
    AND medium IN (1,3)
    AND date_active > NOW()
    AND...

Any further information I am happy to provide.

Answer 1

Something like…

SELECT *, COUNT(tbl_comments.id) as comments_count
FROM tbl_articles JOIN tbl_comments ON (tbl_comments.article_id = tbl_articles.id)
GROUP BY tbl_comments.article_id
ORDER BY comments_count;