Question

So I’m building a website where basically users can write stories and each story can have multiple continuations, but I’m trying to figure out how to query my database, so that I can return the first story and the continuations associated with that story, without getting repeated entries, which i would get if I’m just writing a join statement like so:

SELECT idStories, 
       Stories.Title, 
       Stories.Num_parts, 
       Stories.Story, 
       Stories.Date_poste,     
       idStory_continue, 
       Story_continue.Users_idUsers, 
       Story_continue.Title, 
       Story_continue.Story, 
       Story_continue.Date_posted, 
       Story_continue.Part_num 
  FROM Stories s
LEFT JOIN Story_continue sc ON sc.Stories_idStories = s.idStories   

so my question is what is an efficent way of returning this type of query without getting multiple versions of the original story. for instance when I query this I will get all of the original stories, and I will get the continuations, but it repeats the original story if there are multiple continuations to each story. and if you can’t make a query that provides information in this way, how would you go about solving this in php?

Answer 1

You can try a GROUP BY clause, but if you want all the story_continue data, you will need to do a GROUP_CONCAT which can get messy.
I find it easier to split the query up like this. Usually it’s faster than a JOIN/GROUP BY anyways.

$sql = "SELECT idStories, 
           Stories.Title, 
           Stories.Num_parts, 
           Stories.Story, 
           Stories.Date_posted
      FROM Stories";

$stories = $db->fetchAll($sql);

$ids = array();
foreach($stories as $row){
    $ids[] = $row['idStories'];
}
$ids = implode(",",$ids);

$sql = "SELECT idStory_continue, 
           Story_continue.Users_idUsers, 
           Story_continue.Title, 
           Story_continue.Story, 
           Story_continue.Date_posted, 
           Story_continue.Part_num,
           Stories_idStories
        FROM Story_continue IN ($ids)";

$rows = $db->fetchAll($sql);

$continues = array();
foreach($rows as $row){
    // Continues can be referenced by the story id
    $continues[$row['Stories_idStories']][] = $row;
}