Question

Say I have a table called students, containing a list of all the students. Each student can have many courses stored in another table, identified by a student id.

I want to do a query which will get the row from the students table with the info of the student, and also get all of his courses, in one query. The output I want is something like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [id] => 5
            [firstName] => Bob
            [lastName] => Smith
            [email] => ....
            [courses] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 30
                            [name] => Test Course
                            [price] => 400
                        )

                    [1] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 30
                            [name] => Test Course 2
                            [price] => 300
                        )

                )

        )

)

To get the info of students, I would do this query:

SELECT * FROM students WHERE something ='something'

To get the courses for a student, I would do this:

SELECT * FROM courses WHERE studentId = '5'

Is it possible to do both queries at once and get an output like the array above, or do I have to loop through each student and get its courses, then attach it to the array manuallly?

Answer 1

$query = "select * from students inner join courses on studentID = '5' where something  = 'something'"; 
$result = mysql_db_query ($dbname, $query, $link); 
$id = $row[0]; # corresponding to row in students database
$firstName= $row[1]; # corresponding to row in students database
$lastName = $row[2]; # corresponding to row in students database
$email = $row[3]; # corresponding to row in students database
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  echo 'id: '.$row[id];
  echo '<br>';
  echo 'name: '.$row[name];
  echo '<br>';
  echo 'price: '.$row[price];
  echo '<br>';
}