Question

I have two tables, result and gp.

In the result table I have something like this:

|id||student_id   ||course_code||grade||session  ||level||semester|
|1 ||TR/2213234561||MAT111     ||A    ||2009/2010||100  ||first   |
|2 ||TR/2213234561||MAT112     ||B    ||2009/2010||100  ||first   |
|3 ||TR/2213234561||MAT113     ||C    ||2009/2010||100  ||first   |
|4 ||TR/2213234567||MAT111     ||D    ||2009/2010||200  ||first   |
|5 ||TR/2213234567||MAT112     ||C    ||2009/2010||200  ||first   |
|6 ||TR/2213234567||MAT113     ||C    ||2009/2010||200  ||first   |

Then gp table

|id||student_id   ||session  ||level||semester||gp |
|1 ||TR/2213234561||2009/2010||100  ||first   ||4.2|
|2 ||TR/2213234567||2009/2010||100  ||first   ||3.5|
|3 ||TR/2213234561||2010/2011||200  ||first   ||4.2|
|4 ||TR/2213234567||2010/2011||200  ||first   ||3.5|

What I want is like this:

|Matriculation||MAT111||MAT112||MAT113||MAT114||GP |
|TR/2213234561||A     ||B     ||D     ||C     ||4.2|
|TR/2213234567||C     ||D     ||E     ||F     ||3.5|

The course code are not constant – it depends on the course registered by the students

I have done this:

<?php
$rst1 = mysql_query("select distinct course_code from result ", $conn);
echo "<table callspacing='4'>";
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td> Matriculation Number </td>";

$c_code = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rst1))
{
    $c_code[] = $row['course_code'];
}

foreach($c_code as $c_code)
{
    echo "<td>" .$c_code. "</td>";
}

$sql ="SELECT result.student_id,
       MAX(CASE WHEN course_code = ' $c_code' THEN grade END)  $c_code,
       gp.CTC 
       FROM result 
       JOIN gp  
       ON gp.student_id = result.student_id
       GROUP
       BY student_id";

echo "<td> GP</td>";                         
$rst = mysql_query("$sql",$conn) or die(mysql_error());

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rst))
{
    echo "</tr>";
    echo "<tr>";
    echo "<td>" .$row['student_id']. "</td>";
    echo "<td>"  .$row[$c_code]. "</td>";
}

echo "<td>"  .$row[$c_code]. "</td>";
echo "<td>" .$row['CTC']. "</td>";

echo"</tr>";
echo "</table>";
?>

The first query was to get the course code, since the courses are not constants.

with that code, I got something like this:

|Matriculation||MAT111||MAT112||MAT113||MAT114||GP|
|TR/2213234561|
|TR/2213234567|

But I wanted

|Matriculation||MAT111||MAT112||MAT113||MAT114||GP |
|TR/2213234561||A     ||B     ||D     ||C     ||4.2|
|TR/2213234567||C     ||D     ||E     ||F     ||3.5|

Any suggestion or direction will be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

What you wish to do is known as “pivoting” your data and is something for which some other RDBMS have native support, but MySQL does not (by design, as the developers feel that such manipulations belong in the presentation layer).

However, you have a few options:

1. Construct a rather horrible MySQL query to perform the pivoting operation manually:

   SELECT student_id AS Matriculation, MAT111, MAT112, gp AS GP
     FROM gp
     NATURAL JOIN (
       SELECT student_id, grade AS MAT111
       FROM result
       WHERE course_code = 'MAT111'
     ) AS tMAT111
     NATURAL JOIN (
       SELECT student_id, grade AS MAT112
       FROM result
       WHERE course_code = 'MAT112'
     ) AS tMAT112
     -- etc.
   WHERE level = @level AND semester = @semester
   

   If you choose to go down this path, you can make your life slightly easier by generating this query automatically, using either a looping construct in PHP or a prepared statement in MySQL.

   Here is one way that you could do that in PHP:

   1. Obtain a list of courses:

      $dbh = new PDO('mysql:dbname=testdb;host=127.0.0.1', $user, $password);
      $qry = $dbh->query("SELECT DISTINCT course_code FROM result [WHERE ...]");
      $courses = $qry->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_COLUMN, 0);
      

   2. Loop over the results, constructing the above SQL:

      mb_regex_encoding($charset);
      
      $columns = mb_ereg_replace('`', '``', $courses);
      $sql = "
      SELECT student_id AS Matriculation, `".implode("`,`", $columns)."`, gp AS GP
        FROM gp";
      
      foreach ($columns as $column) $sql .= "
        NATURAL JOIN (
          SELECT student_id, grade AS `$column`
          FROM result
          WHERE course_code = ?
        ) AS `t$column`";
      
      $sql .= "
      WHERE level = ? AND semester = ?";
      

   3. Execute the SQL, passing in the array of courses as parameters:

      $qry = $dbh->prepare($sql);
      
      $params = $courses;
      array_push($params, $level, $semester);
      $qry->execute($params);
      

   4. Output the results:

      echo "<table>";
      
      echo "<tr>";
      for ($i = 0; $i < $qry->columnCount(); $i++) {
        $meta = $qry->getcolumnMeta($i);
        echo "<th scope='col'>" . htmlentities($meta['name']) . "</th>";
      }
      echo "</tr>";
      
      while ($row = $qry->fetch(PDO::FETCH_NUM)) {
        echo "<tr>";
        foreach ($row as $field) echo "<td>" . htmlentities($field) . "</td>"
        echo "</tr>";
      }
      
      echo "</table>";
      

2. Do the above as a one-off operation so that the structure of your MySQL database is changed to more closely reflect this desired layout (easy once table is converted, but may impact other uses of the database):

   CREATE TABLE StudentGrades (PRIMARY KEY('Matriculation'))
   SELECT student_id AS Matriculation, MAT111, MAT112, gp AS GP
     -- etc. as above
   

   Alternatively, you can create a VIEW which is a sort of “virtual table” structured in this way based on the underlying table.

3. Pivot the data manually in PHP (relatively tedious).