Question

I’ve a small piece of code I’ve tried to wrap my brain around for some hours now.

I’m trying to create a query which retrieves some elements and in the end group them by a selector.
I’ll try to demonstrate: I’m querying all the members in my organization. Each member is a member of a “department” and there can be several members in each department, but only one department for each member.

So I’ve created the query to select all members in my organization group by departments.

When I’m displaying it using a simple foreach($my_query as $q) … I want to output $q->department_name but only once for that department. Right now it says “Marketing” under all five members and then it changes to “HR” for all those members. I’ve tried some different methods such as array_unique, creating a function that checks for the string to see if it is the same and other but with no result.

I could create two foreach loops but if it is at all possible not to I would prefer that because two foreach loops would affect the performance.

Any help or suggestion would be very much appreciated.

Sinerely
– Mestika

— Edited —
By the way, my query looks like this:

SELECT * 
FROM wp_term_taxonomy AS cat_term_taxonomy
INNER JOIN wp_terms AS cat_terms ON cat_term_taxonomy.term_id = cat_terms.term_id
INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS cat_term_relationships ON cat_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = cat_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
INNER JOIN wp_posts AS cat_posts ON cat_term_relationships.object_id = cat_posts.ID
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta AS meta ON cat_posts.ID = meta.post_id
WHERE cat_posts.post_status =  'publish'
AND meta.meta_key =  'active'
AND meta.meta_value =  'active'
AND cat_posts.post_type =  'member'
AND cat_term_taxonomy.taxonomy =  'deparment'
GROUP BY cat_terms.slug, cat_term_relationships.object_id

Answer 1

$prev_department = NULL;

foreach ($my_query AS $q)
{
  if ($prev_department != $q->department_name)
    echo '<h2>'. htmlentities($q->department_name, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8') .'</h2>';

  // ...

  $prev_department = $q->department_name;
}