Question

So I have two tables, article and comments (which has one-to-many relationship (1 article – many comments)). This is how the table is structured:

Articles – id (prikey), title, publicationDate, content

Comments – com_id (prikey), author, comment, id (foreign key)

I used this to query the two tables:

SELECT * FROM articles as a INNER JOIN comments as c ON a.id = c.id

Previously, I was only displaying the articles table using this:

<?php 
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {

echo "
<div id='article'> 
<header>
    <hgroup>
         <h2>".$row['title']."</h2>
         <h4>Posted on ".$row['publicationDate']."</h4>
    </hgroup>
</header><p>".$row['content']."</p></div>";
}
?>

This displays all articles (with date, title, content, etc.). Now there are comments. How do I edit the php code (or if my query is incorrect, how to write the query), so that it shows all articles and all comments per article as in:

Article One
 -- Comment 1
 -- Comment 2, etc.

Article Two
 -- Comment 1
 -- Comment 2, etc.

Answer 1

An alternative would be to split the query into two.

The first would bring back the articles you want…

SELECT * FROM article;

Once you have those, you can get all the IDs and use something like the following

SELECT * FROM comments WHERE article_id IN (".$list.");

This restricts the MySQL queries to 2 whilst getting all the data you need. After this loop around the article data, and in that loop, loop around the comments data.

This also means that, unlike using GROUP_CONCAT, you will also have author data to use.

It’s not a very eloquent solution, but should work.