Question

I want to return a row for every month in a range specified- what I’m having trouble with is- that if I do not have a row there is nothing returned; What i was want is the month name to be returned and winner_id to be null

my query so far.

SELECT MONTHNAME(dated) as Month, winner_id FROM competitions WHERE dated > '2012-01-01'

What i want my output to look like is

Month     Winner_id
-------------------
January   NULL
February  2654
March     19864
April     NULL

the problem is i do not have a row for january or april in the db- but i still want a month returned?

should i do the months in php and do individual queries for each month?

Answer 1

There are ways to do this in MySql but it would be overkill in your case. I’d use a variation of your current query and fill the gaps in php:

$res = mysql_query( "SELECT MONTH(dated) as month, winner_id".
                    " FROM competitions WHERE dated > '2012-01-01'");
$months = array();
for($i = 1; $i <= 6; ++$i) $month[$i] = 0;
while($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
    $month[$r['month']] = $r['winner_id'];
}
...