Question

I’m making a simple PHP Forum, whereby tags are created alongside the main topic.

The table looks like this:

  CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `topic` (
  `topic_id ` int(100) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `topic_head` varchar(5) NOT NULL,
  `topic_body` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `topic_tag` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `topic_date` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `topic_owner` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`topic_id`)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=4 ;

Specifically for the tags, I’ll be performing a select query in the form of:

$tags = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT topic_tags
                       FROM forum_topics")
                       while($tags = mysql_fetch_assoc($tags){   
                       $split_tags  = "$tags";
                       $pieces = explode(",", $split_tags);

Currently, topic_tags are in the format tag1,tag2,tag3,tag4
How can I have it in such a way that each topic tag will be associated with each topic?

Answer 1

If I’ve understood correctly, what you want is another table for tags and then a third table to store the relationships. So:

CREATE TABLE `tags` (
  `t_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `t_text` varchar(150) NOT NULL,
  `t_datetime` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`t_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE `tag_pairs` (
  `tp_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `tp_topic_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `tp_tag_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `tp_datetime` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`tp_id`),
  FOREIGN KEY (`tp_topic_id`) REFERENCES topic('topic_id'), 
  FOREIGN KEY (`tp_tag_id`) REFERENCES tags('t_id') 
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

Then, to get tags for a topic based on its ID ($THIS_ID):

$query = mysql_query("
  SELECT tags.t_text 
  FROM tags, tag_pairs, topic 
  WHERE topic.topic_id = '$THIS_ID'
  AND tag_pairs.tp_topic_id = topic.topic_id 
  AND tag_pairs.tp_tag_id = tags.t_id 
 ");