Question

Struggling a bit with MySQL. I’ve found the GROUP_CONCAT function which looks right for my needs, but I can’t work out how to use it. What I’d like to do is search in several columns as well as the concat column; so if any of the columns equal my search term (%a% in this example) it should be returned. I’ve worked out how to return the concatenated genre string but I can’t work out how to search on it.

SELECT albumArtworkURL, albumName, albumID, 
  b.artistID AS ArtistID, b.artistName AS ArtistName,
  GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT c.songGenre separator ',') AS genres
FROM album
LEFT JOIN artist b ON album.albumArtist = b.artistID
LEFT JOIN song c ON albumID = c.songOnAlbum
WHERE albumName LIKE '%a%' OR albumYear LIKE '%a%'
GROUP BY albumArtworkURL, albumName, albumID, ArtistID, ArtistName
ORDER BY albumYear ASC, albumName ASC

Would really appreciate some help. Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

If you want to search on the result of the GROUP_CONCAT(), then you could wrap your query in another select:

SELECT *
FROM
(
  SELECT albumArtworkURL, 
    albumName, 
    albumID, 
    b.artistID AS ArtistID, 
    b.artistName AS ArtistName,
    GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT c.songGenre separator ',') AS genres
  FROM album
  LEFT JOIN artist b 
    ON album.albumArtist = b.artistID
  LEFT JOIN song c 
    ON albumID = c.songOnAlbum
  GROUP BY albumArtworkURL, albumName, albumID, ArtistID, ArtistName
) src
WHERE albumName LIKE '%a%' 
  OR albumYear LIKE '%a%'
  OR genres LIKE  '%a%'
ORDER BY albumYear ASC, albumName ASC

But unless I am missing something in your explanation, I don’t know why you can’t just search on the songGenre instead of the concat version of it:

SELECT albumArtworkURL, 
  albumName, 
  albumID, 
  b.artistID AS ArtistID, 
  b.artistName AS ArtistName,
  GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT c.songGenre separator ',') AS genres
FROM album
LEFT JOIN artist b 
  ON album.albumArtist = b.artistID
LEFT JOIN song c 
  ON albumID = c.songOnAlbum
WHERE albumName LIKE '%a%' 
  OR albumYear LIKE '%a%'
  OR songGenre LIKE '%a%'
GROUP BY albumArtworkURL, albumName, albumID, ArtistID, ArtistName
ORDER BY albumYear ASC, albumName ASC