5 replies to this topic

[Whitey]

So i have a DB with a table in called 'friends' and in the table i have userID and FriendID, thus finding all the friends you would look up userID and display all of them..

If i have 5 friends and their names are Kyle, Joe, Bob, Dillion, and Josh.
When i go to look up my friends i want to know how to sort all those names alphabetically

so the table
___friend_____
--userID-- --friendID--
________________

_____________users______________
--ID -- --name-- --username-- --password--
_______________________________

a foreach within a foreach would work but im not sure how to save all data to an array then sort that array by name then echo, but thats not a very good way of doing it.. seems fairly slow..

[haltox]

It should look like this :

SELECT name 

FROM friend,users

WHERE friendID = ID

ORDER BY name ASC;

[WingedPanther]

Select * from friend inner join users on friend.friendID = users.ID where friend.userID='me' order by users.name

[RhetoricalRuvim]

If you're using MySQL, you could do something like this:

SELECT * FROM `users` ORDER BY `name` ASC

You can also use 'DESC' instead of 'ASC', to order them backwards (first Joe, then Bob).
And you can insert a 'WHERE' clause, too, if you need that.

[Whitey]

WingedPanther said:

Select * from friend inner join users on friend.friendID = users.ID where friend.userID='me' order by users.name

Thank you for understanding what i was saying.. Its that easy ha! :D

[WingedPanther]

Joins are one of those things that take a while for most programmers to get the hang of. Actually, SQL is that way as well. We get so used to doing EVERYTHING using arrays, and other low-level features, that it never occurs to us that we can use the tool to do the heavy lifting for us.

With that said, I've done a few things in SQL where I tried to get it to do the heavy lifting, and I found out I was better off doing it the old-fashioned way.