Question

I’ve got a query to my MySQL database returning four fields of information from a MySQL table (information), which I then encode for JSON using PHP’s json_encode() function. Two of the fields it returns are “staffMember” and “lineManager”, which return integers that relate to the ID of that person in a (separate) users table.

My query returns the following (in table format):

id is 1
staffMember is 14
lineManager is 12
description is this is a description

etc.. for all the rows.

14 (in the case of the above for example) refers to a row in the users table that would be something like:

id is 14
firstname is dave
secondname is jones

My question is therefore, how can I get the JSON part of the query to return “dave jones” instead of 14? As the info isn’t held in the same table in MySQL.

Answer 1

Use LEFT JOIN in your database request like

SELECT a.id, CONCAT(b.firstname, ' ', b.secondname) AS staffMember, a.lineManager, a.description 
  FROM a 
  LEFT JOIN b ON (a.staffMember = b.id)

where a and b – your table names