Question

Sorry for the title, I didn’t know what else to put.

I am looking to pull all the information on a user in a single database query.

There are 4 tables:

user  
  - userid (PK)
services
  - serviceid (PK)
languages
  - langid (PK)
areas
  - areaid (PK)
user_services
  - user_services_id (PK)
  - serviceid (FK)
  - userid (FK)
user_languages
  - user_lang_id (PK)  
  - langid (FK)
  - userid (FK)
user_areas
  - user_area_id (PK)
  - areaid (FK)
  - userid (FK)

Both user and user_services I can pull out fine together as they have one row each and are linked by the user.id.

The user_languages and user_areas table are one to many tables and look similar to:

user_lang_id  |  userid  |  langid
      1       |     5    |     2
      2       |     5    |     6
      3       |     5    |    18

user_area_id  |  userid  |  areaid
      1       |     5    |    15
      2       |     5    |     4
      3       |     5    |    13

What I want the array to look like is this:

Array
(
    [id] => 5
    [firstname] => lethal    
    [surname] => Mango
    [gender] => male
    ...
    [langid] => 2
    [langid] => 6
    [langid] => 18
    ...
    [areaid] => London
    [areaid] => Birmingham
    [areaid] => Manchester
}

I have tried a combination SQL JOINs but that didn’t seem to get very far. My last resort was to do 3 seperate queries and join the PHP arrays together at the end (super messy).

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

We can help you more if you provide us with the structure of the tables, but you can do it with JOINs as long as all your tables share a foreign key to one another. It doesn’t have to be the same key field (such as user_id), but that does make it more straightforward. With joins, you should have something like this:

select * from user
left join user_services on user_services.id = user.id
left join user_languages on user.id = user_languages.id
left join user_areas on user.id = user_areas.id

This will give you a virtual table that has all of the columns needed. You can then create an array from these columns with the data you need with something like this:

foreach($query_result as $field => $value) {
    $user[$field] = $value;
} 

*Note – Code samples are untested and only for sample purposes.