Canfigure out how to show replies for bulletin board

jrmontg

I am trying to show replies for a post on a bulletin board that I am building. All of the replys are in my table bbMessages.

I have a page where you select the Topic and it goes to another page that displays the posts (bbmain.bbDescription). by the posts I need to show how many replys have been entered into the bbMessages table.

I have these tables:

bbTopic

bbTopicKey
BBTopic

bbmain

bbKey
bbTopicKey
bbDescription

bbMessages

bbMessageKey
bbKey
bbMessage

I tried this but it did not work. I got all messages that had a bbTopicKey of one.

SELECT bbtopic.bbTopicKey, bbmain.bbTopicKey, bbmain.bbKey, bbmessages.bbKey
FROM bbtopic, bbmain, bbmessages
WHERE bbtopic.bbTopicKey = 1 AND bbtopic.bbTopicKey = bbmain.bbTopicKey AND bbmain.bbKey = bbmessages.bbKey

Thanks for your help.

eoghain

I tried this but it did not work. I got all messages that had a bbTopicKey of one.

Well that's what you should have gotten based on the query you wrote.

WHERE bbtopic.bbTopicKey = 1

That constrained your bbTopicKey to = 1. Then you joined your main table based on the bbTopicKey, and finally joined your messages table by the bbKey. This query gave you exactly what you asked for.

And from what I can gather from your post this is what you were trying to get, but since you don't think so maybe you should explain the results that you got, and the results that you were expecting.

jrmontg

I want to see how many time users reply to a post.

The post is in bbmain

the replies are in bbmessages

First Page:

bbTopic

when the user clicks on the bbTopic it goes to another page

Page 2:

bbDescription

This description is filtered by the bbTopicKey that is passed.

I want it to show

bbDescription and total of bbMessage that relates to the bbDescription.

eoghain

You'll have to do this with 2 queries, or get way more data back than it seems like you want.

// Get Original Message
SELECT bbKey, bbDescription
  FROM bbMain
 WHERE bbTopicKey = ??

// Get count of Replies from bbMessages
SELECT count(*)
  FROM bbMessages
 WHERE bbKey = ??

When you get to the page you will have the TopicKey that was selected from the first page, use that to get your description and the bbKey from bbMain, and then use bbKey to get a count of the rows in bbMessages.

jrmontg

Thay makes sense.

I don't know how to do that though. DO I query the database first for

// Get Original Message
SELECT bbKey, bbDescription
FROM bbMain
WHERE bbTopicKey = ??

somehow assign the bbkey to something then use that for the second query

// Get count of Replies from bbMessages
SELECT count(*)
FROM bbMessages
WHERE bbKey = ??

Do you know of a article that shows how to do this?

Thanks

eoghain

Every article on using PHP with databases shows how to do this.

Look at the PHP manual at php.net for the database functions you'll be using and you'll see tons of examples.

Or look at any of the database articles here on phpbuilder.com.