Question

I’m trying to get all users, and order them by a field on another table, however this field doesn’t always exist?

Users – Holds Users
User Meta – Holds metadata, specifically “weight” which is what I’m trying to order by.

A more concrete solution would be to automatically define them a default weight, however is there anyway I can make it work without? Current working query:

SELECT * FROM users u, usermeta um 
WHERE u.ID = um.ID 
  AND u.name LIKE '%search_terms%';

Lost on the order by part, any/all help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

If you have a key relationship between the tables (u.ID = um.ID) and you want to list all users, you could use something like this to order by weight on usermeta.

The LEFT JOIN lets you keep ALL users, regardless of their existence in usermeta:

SELECT *, IFNULL(um.weight,9999) as newweight
FROM users u
LEFT JOIN usermeta um on u.ID = um.ID
WHERE u.name LIKE '%search_terms%'
ORDER BY IFNULL(um.weight,9999);