Question

Let’s say i have a database design like this:

for the data:

id |    title     | category
1  | first title  | 1
2  | second title | 4
3  | third title  | 5
4  | fourth title | 2
5  | fifth title  | 3
6  | other title  | 1

and for the categories:

id | name 
1  | music 
2  | movies
3  | funny 
4  | people 
5  | sport 

How can i output a list with each category with item title from that category?

somethink like:

<div>
<h1>music</h1>
<div>first title</div>
<div>other title</div>
<div>

<div>
<h1>movies</h1>
<div>fourth title</div>
<div>

// and so on...

I don’t know how to formulate the mysql query for a result like this…

Can somebody please advise me? (i hope the example can be understood easily)

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:
i used Eugen Rieck’s code but i don’t know how to do the following thing

how can i order by the categories.id and titles.id in the same time eventually use a where condition after that?

something like this: ORDER BY titles.id DESC LIMIT 0, 10 WHERE titles.views > 10

Answer 1

Assuming your first table is called titles and your second table categories, use a query like

SELECT categories.name as cat, tiltes.title as title
FROM categories INNER JOIN titles ON titles.category=categories.id
ORDER BY categories.id

and then do a group change loop

define('MAX_TITLES_PER_CAT',10);

$cat='';
$tcount=0;
while (true) {
  //Fetch a row depending on your DB framework, eg. mysql_fetch_row()
  if ($row['cat']!=$cat) {
    if ($cat!='') echo '</div>';
    $cat=$row['cat'];
    $tcount=MAX_TITLES_PER_CAT;
    echo "<div><h1>$cat</h1>";
  }
  if ($tcount--<=0) continue;
  echo '<div>'.$row['title'].'</div>';
}
if ($cat!='') echo '</div>';

EDIT

I updated the above code to limit the count of titles displayed per category to MAX_TITLES_PER_CAT – please understand, that this is very inefficient, if the average number of titles per category is much higher than MAX_TITLES_PER_CAT.