Question

SELECT
*,
(SELECT
GROUP_CONCAT(url SEPARATOR '$$' )
FROM project_photos
WHERE project_id = projects.id
ORDER BY priority) AS images
FROM projects
WHERE catID = 2
LIMIT 0,5

above query works fine but the images coloumn are not ordered as priority , unable to understand why it is happening

// Structure for table project is
CREATE TABLE `projects` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`catID` int(11) NOT NULL,
`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`description` varchar(400) NOT NULL,
`url` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`tags` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`featured` varchar(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'No',
`featured_url` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`order` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `catID` (`catID`),
CONSTRAINT `FK_catID` FOREIGN KEY (`catID`) REFERENCES `category` (`catID`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=48 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;


// Structure for table project_photos is

CREATE TABLE `project_photos` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`url` varchar(250) DEFAULT NULL,
`project_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`priority` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=347 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Answer 1

Ordering using ORDER BY is done after applying aggregate functions like GROUP_CONCAT(). To sort the result of GROUP_CONCAT() put it inside the argument:

SELECT
GROUP_CONCAT(url ORDER BY priority SEPARATOR '$$')
FROM project_photos
WHERE project_id = projects.id