Question

I have three tables.

students
studentID | FirstName | LastName | Email | Form  

course
CCode | Title  

courseenrolement
courseenrolementid | studentID | ccode | complete | scode

With the website, I have a page where I can view all the current enrolements and I wish to be able to view the list displaying the first name, surname and course title. I know I could do it with the following SQL (for the names):

SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM student, courseenrolement 
WHERE courseenrolement.studentID = student.studentID

But I am unsure how to get this to work using HTML/PHP. At present I only know how to display the studentID and CCode from the courseenrolement table using the following code:

<ul>
  <?php foreach ($courseenrolements as $ce): ?>
    <li>
      <form action="" method="post">
        <div>
          <?php htmlout($ce['studentID']); ?>
          <?php htmlout($ce['CCode']); ?>
          <input type="hidden" name="courseenrolementid" value="<?php
              echo $ce['courseenrolementid']; ?>">
          <input type="submit" name="action" value="Edit">
          <input type="submit" name="action" value="Delete">
        </div>
      </form>
    </li>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

which displays this:

But I would like the names and course title. I managed to get it to show the names etc in the dropdown on the ‘Add new’ form, so I would assume it will be similar, but just unsure on how exactly. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

It appears you’re not using a web development framework. That being the case, check out PHP’s PDO library, which lets you make portable database queries in a structured manner.

Regardless of whether you check out the PDO library, what you need here is to expand your query with a JOIN, and select the columns you want. Google for simple examples of JOIN queries, because your use-case seems pretty simple. You can then iterate over the result set resource with a for loop, and output data to HTML as necessary.