Question

I’m trying to get the profiles names which are assigned to a specific subcategory
with id=9. When I run the code below, I get the profiles that I want but for some
reason the ORDER BY clause in the foreach loop doesn’t sort them by their name
alphabetically. Instead they are ordered in the same way they are ordered inside the
‘profiles’ field in ‘subcategories’ table (the IDs for the profiles are comma separated).
For example if in subcategories[‘profiles’] I have ‘,5,1,2’ the profiles names will be displayed
in the following order:

1. Profile with ID=5
2. Profile with ID=1
3. Profile with ID=2

I’m using the explode() function to get the ID for each profile inside the ‘subcategory’
table and then use that ID to retrieve their information from the ‘profile’ table using
a query inside the foreach loop.

Am I missing anything here? Thanks for your help.

Here’s my code:

<?php
$subcategories=mysql_query("select * from subcategories where id='9'");

while ($subcategories = mysql_fetch_array($subcategories)) 

{
 $profiles = $subcategories['profiles'];
 $profiles = explode(',', $profiles);

       foreach ($profiles as $p)
       {
         $all_places = mysql_query("select * from profile where id='$p' and active='1' order by name asc");

           while ($profile = mysql_fetch_array($all_places)) 
           {

               echo $profile['name'];                   

           }

       }

}
?>

Answer 1

Well the reason why your results do not order by name is because you are retrieving every profile with a new SQL query in your foreach loop for $profiles. So effectively in your scenario, you will end up with 3 SQL queries that returns 1 profile each. Hence, when the “order by” clause is declared, it orders by name within each query, which only contains 1 result each.

does using an IN statement work for you? Eg.

    <?php
$subcategories=mysql_query("select * from subcategories where id='9'");

while ($subcategories = mysql_fetch_array($subcategories)) 

{

//i assume $subcategories['profiles'] are integers separated by comma as mentioned
 $profiles = $subcategories['profiles'];

                 $all_places = mysql_query("select * from profile where id IN ($profiles) and active='1' order by name asc");

                     while ($profile = mysql_fetch_array($all_places)) 
                     {

                       echo $profile['name'];                   

                     }

}
?>