Question

Normally when I group stuff together it is for the obvious use to group together duplicates, but I am making a winners page that shows winners for a bunch of jackpots, some jackpots have 1 winner while other have 3, using GROUP BY date will work if there is only 1 winner but will only show 1 winner when there should be 3.

Here is my code

$result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM r_winners GROUP BY date ORDER BY date DESC");
while($rows = $result->fetch_assoc()){
print"<table class='cashout' style='width:100%;'>
<th colspan='3'>".$rows['jackpot_name']." Winners</th>
<tr>
<td style='width:33%;'>".$rows['winner']."</td><td style='width:33%;'>$".$rows['amount']."</td><td style='width:33%;'>".date("m/d/Y", $rows['date'])."</td></tr>
</tr></table>";
}

It prints out a table like such

---------------------------------------
Daily     Jackpot     Winners
Username|  $5.00   |  12/5/2012         // This table is right, because there is only 1 winner
---------------------------------------

Because there is only 1 winner then GROUP BY really has no affect here

Here is a table for multiple winners

---------------------------------------
Monthly     Jackpot     Winners
Username  |  $5.00   |  12/5/2012         // This table is wrong, because there should be 3 winners
---------------------------------------

It needs to look like this

---------------------------------------
Monthly     Jackpot     Winners
Username  |  $5.00   |  12/5/2012 
Username2 |  $2.00   |  12/5/2012
Username3 |  $1.00   |  12/5/2012        
---------------------------------------

How can I accomplish this?

EDIT: This can maybe explain this better https://gist.github.com/4221167

Answer 1

Change your query to just use ORDER BY and reformat your loop, placing the table elements outside, and only printing the header once

$result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM r_winners ORDER BY date DESC");
print"<table class='cashout' style='width:100%;'>";
$jackpot_name = '';
while($rows = $result->fetch_assoc()){
    if ($jackpot_name != $rows['jackpot_name']) {
        $jackpot_name = $rows['jackpot_name'];
        print "<th colspan='3'>".$rows['jackpot_name']." Winners</th>";
    }
    print "<tr><td style='width:33%;'>".$rows['winner']."</td><td style='width:33%;'>$".$rows['amount']."</td><td style='width:33%;'>".date("m/d/Y", $rows['date'])."</td></tr>";
}
print "</table>";