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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T03:04:19+00:00

So I am trying to develop an activity feed for my site, Basically If

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So I am trying to develop an activity feed for my site,

Basically If I UNION a bunch of activities into a feed I would end up with something like the following.

Chris is now friends with Mark

Chris is now friends with Dave

What I want though is a neater way of grouping these similar posts so the feed doesn’t give information overload…

E.g.

Chris is now friends with Mark, Dave and 4 Others

Any ideas on how I can approach this logically?

I am using Classic ASP on SQL server.

Here is the UNION statement I have so far…

SELECT      U.UserID As UserID, L.UN As UN,Left(U.UID,13) As ProfilePic,U.Fname + ' ' + U.Sname As FullName, 'said ' + WP.Post AS Activity, WP.Ctime
FROM         Users AS U LEFT JOIN Logins L ON L.userID = U.UserID LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      WallPosts AS WP ON WP.userID = U.userID WHERE WP.Ctime IS NOT NULL
UNION
SELECT     U.UserID As UserID, L.UN As UN,Left(U.UID,13) As ProfilePic,U.Fname + ' ' + U.Sname As FullName, 'commented ' + C.Comment AS Activity, C.Ctime
FROM         Users AS U LEFT JOIN Logins L ON L.userID = U.UserID LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      Comments AS C ON C.UserID = U.userID WHERE C.Ctime IS NOT NULL
UNION
SELECT     U.UserID As UserID, L.UN As UN,Left(U.UID,13) As ProfilePic, U.Fname + ' ' + U.Sname As FullName, 'connected with <a href="/profile.asp?un='+(SELECT Logins.un FROM Logins WHERE Logins.userID = Cn.ToUserID)+'">' + (SELECT Users.Fname + ' ' + Users.Sname FROM Users WHERE userID = Cn.ToUserID) + '</a>' AS Activity, Cn.Ctime
FROM         Users AS U LEFT JOIN Logins L ON L.userID = U.UserID LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      Connections AS Cn ON Cn.UserID = U.userID WHERE CN.Ctime IS NOT NULL
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Just a general bit of advice: you should not be using display side logic in your SQL queries. For example you are writing <a> tags and HTML inside of your SQL code which I think is widely frowned upon. Additionally I think that the solution to your problem should be in the scripting end, not in a SQL query.

    As for your particular example, I think if you ordered by U.UserID then you would retrieve your data in a form where it will always have the “Chris is friends with …” items grouped together. From there I would work on my loop logic in ASP, so that instead of just looping through the recordset and outputting it, I would check each entry, and see if the userID from this activity matches the previous userID and then just join them. So for instance you could try the below (untested) code:

    oldID = 0
activityCount = 0
activityStream = ""
Do While Not rs.eof
    If oldID <> rs("ID") Then
        Response.Write(activityStream)
        activityStream = rs("FullName") & " is friends with " & rs("ToUserID")
    Else
        activityCount = activityCount + 1
        If activityCount <= 3 Then
            activityStream = activityStream & ", " & rs("ToUserID")
        Else
            activityStream = activityStream & " and <a href='#'>" & activityCount & "others</a>"
            activityCount = 0
        End If
    End If
    oldID = rs("ID")
rs.Movenext
Loop
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