Question

I have two tables, one stores events for a user and the other stores the photos for each event. The layout is as follows:

event (event_id, 
       event_title, 
       event_description, 
       event_date, 
       event_time, 
       event_city, 
       event_state, 
       event_user)

photo (photo_id, 
       photo_photo, 
       photo_thumbnail, 
       photo_caption, 
       photo_event)

On my event page I want to display all of my events in a grid. Now, the catch is that I am using a live album preview with jQuery (http://tutorialzine.com/2012/12/album-photo-previews-jquery/) so I need all of the thumbnails for each event to be returned as well. Can I do this with a single query?

My current query is

"SELECT event.*, photo_thumbnail FROM event 
   LEFT JOIN photo ON event_id = photo_event 
   WHERE event_user = ?;" 

but it is giving me the event information for each photo returned which is unnecessary. I just need the event information once along with every photo for each event. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I would use something like:

SELECT event.*, GROUP_CONCAT(photo_thumbnail) as thumbnails
FROM event 
LEFT JOIN photo ON event_id = photo_event 
WHERE event_user = ?
GROUP BY event.event_id;

This will give a thumbnails column in your results which will be a comma separated list of the thumbnails.