Question

I’m joining 4 tables and want to create a while loop that spits out results nested under different categories.

My Tables

categories
id | category_name

pages
id | page_name | category

page_content
id | page_id | image_id

images
id | thumb_path

My current SQL join

<?php $all_photos = mysql_query("
    SELECT * FROM categories JOIN pages ON pages.category = categories.id
    JOIN image_pages ON image_pages.page_id = pages.id
    JOIN images ON images.id = image_pages.image_id
");?>

The result I want from a while loop

I would like to get something like this….

Category 1
page 1
Image 1, image 2, image 3

page 2
Image 2, image 4

Category 2
page 3
image 1

page 4
image 1, image 2, image 3

Each image can fall under multiple pages and each page can fall under multiple categories.

at the moment I have 2 solutions, one which lists each category several times according to the the amount of pages inside them:

eg. category 1, page 1, image 1 – category 1, page 1, image 2 etc

One that uses a while loop inside another while loop inside another while loop, resulting in 3 sql queries.

<?php $all_categories = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM categories");?>

<?php 

    while($all_category = mysql_fetch_array($all_categories)) {

        ?>
        <h4><?=$all_category['category_name']?></h4>

        <?php $all_pages = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM pages WHERE category = " . $all_category['id'] . "");?>

        <?php 
            while($all_page = mysql_fetch_array($all_pages)) {
            ?>
                <p><?=$all_page['page_name']?></p>


                <?php $all_images = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM images JOIN image_pages ON image_pages.page_id  = " . $all_page['id'] . " AND image_pages.image_id = images.id");

                ?>

                <div class="admin-images-block clearfix">

                <?php

                while($all_image = mysql_fetch_array($all_images)) {
                ?>


                    <img src="<?=$all_image['thumb_path']?>" alt="<?=$all_image['title']?>"/>


                <?php
                }

                ?>
                </div>
                <?php
            }
    }

?>

Answer 1

I think second solution is better and straight forward.
You can do this like:

Update:

  <?php
$all_cats=mysql_query("select * from categories");
while($all_cat = mysql_fetch_array($all_cats)){
    //print your cat title 
    $check = mysql_query("select * from images i, pages p, page_content pc categories c where c.id = p.category and p.id = pc.page_id and pc.image_id=i.id");

    if(mysql_num_rows($check) > 0){

    $all_pages=mysql_query("select * from pages where category=".$all_cat['id']);
    while($all_page = mysql_fetch_array($all_pages)){
        //print your page
        echo "<p>".$all_page['page_name']."</p>";
        ?>
        <div class="admin-images-block clearfix">
            <?php

            $all_images=mysql_query("select * from images where id=".$all_page['image_id']);
            while($all_image = mysql_fetch_array($all_images)) {
            //print your img
            ?>
                <img src="<?=$all_image['thumb_path']?>" alt="<?=$all_image['title']?>"/>
            <?php}?>
         </div>
    <?php
    }

    }
}
?>

Best of luck 🙂