Question

Say I have a table containing articles (article_id, article_name) and another table containing the names of people (person_id, person_name) that ordered the articles. Plus an intermediary table, say articles-people (article_id, person_id).

Is there an elegant way I could do a single SELECT to get all the articles and the associated purchasers such that the articles would each listed in headers and the people are listed under the respective articles they’ve bought?

Also, is there a SELECT that would fetch the needed information but avoid a result like this (which looks like a badly structured DB):

• article_id:1,article_name:penlight,purchaser_id:1, purchaser_name:fred
• article_id:1,article_name:penlight,purchaser_id:2, purchaser_name:albert
• article_id:1,article_name:penlight,purchaser_id:3, purchaser_name:sonia
• …

Answer 1

This should print out rows with values.

   $res = mssql_query('SELECT *
        FROM articles a
        join articles-people ap on a.article_id=ap.articleid
        join people p on ap.person_id=p.personid');

    $results = array();
    $finalResuls = array();
    while($row = mssql_fetch_assoc($res))
    {
       $results[] = $row;
    }

    foreach($results as $result)
    {
       /* This makes an array with key:value pairs as string. */
       foreach($result as $k => $v)
       {
          $finalResults[] = $k . ': ' . $v;
       }
       $string = '';
       /* Will concatenate data for each result row into a single string */
       foreach($result as $k => $v)
       {
          $string .= $k . ': ' . $v;
       }
       $finalResults[] = $string;
    }

So that you can have both solutions in the same post, here is the solution you were talking about with JNK.

$res = mssql_query('SELECT * from article');

$results = array();
while($row = mssql_fetch_assoc($res))
{
   $id = $row['article_id'];
   $res2 = mssql_query("SELECT * from people p join articles-people ap on p.person_id=ap.person_id where ap.article_id='$id'");
   while($row2 = mssql_fetch_assoc($res2))
   {
      foreach($row2 as $k => $v)
      {
         $results[$id][] = $k . ': ' . $v;
      }
   }
}