Question

I’m a student in web developing and I’ve encountered a problem with a MySQL statement. I was asked by a game community to create some sort of little website where they could see which people they banned.

There are 2 tables which I use, ‘accounts’ and ‘bans’. The layout of accounts is somewhat like this

account_id  username  (more columns)
----        ----      ----
1           hey       ...
2           hdf       ...
3           sdf       ...
4           admin     ...

The layout of ‘bans’ is:

ban_id      account_id    bannedby_id    (more columns)
----        ----          ----           ----
1           1             4              ...
2           3             4              ...

In this case an admin with ID 4 has banned the accounts with ID 1 and 3. I want to create a query where I have both the name of the banned person, and the name of the admin who banned him in a single result.

I do this now by first doing:

SELECT bans.*, accounts.username FROM bans, accounts WHERE accounts.account_id = bans.account_id

Then looping over all results and selecting the admin name from the result i got:

while($baninfo = mysql_fetch_assoc($sqlBans))
{
    mysql_query("SELECT username FROM accounts WHERE account_id = '" . $baninfo['bannedby_id'] . "'");
}

This worked, but I don’t think this is the correct way to do it. I think there must be a MySQL function which could do such a query but I have searched on Google for it and I couldn’t find it.

Just to be clear, here’s how I would like to get the result from the query:

ban_id   account_id   account_username   bannedby_id   admin_username   (other columns from Bans table)
----     ----         ----               ----          ----             ----
1        1            hey                4             admin            ...
2        3            sdf                4             admin            ...

I’m sorry if this is a very stupid question but I could solve it. I hope you guys have a solution for me. Im using this website a lot as I encounter small problems and it always have great answers.

Regards,
Mark

Answer 1

select b.ban_id,
    b.account_id,
    a.username as account_username,
    b.bannedby_id,
    a2.username as admin_username,
from bans b
inner join accounts a on b.account_id = a.account_id
inner join accounts a2 on b.bannedby_id = a2.account_id