[Resolved] Group by & Display Problems

[bpat1434]

Hey guys.

I'm trying to get values from a database to display properly, so that I get the following in a <select> field:

2005
Construction Photos
2004
Events
General
Lifeguards
Old Pool
Panoramic

Now, I have tried GROUP BY b.cyid (where cyid is the id of the Year that they happened in), but that will only return the first of each. So I took the group by out, then I got each item with each year, so that it looked like:

2005
Construction Photos
2004
Construction Photos

How would I go about doing this? I'm truly at a stand still. Here's the code I have:

$query = "SELECT * FROM `Years` a, `Categories` b ORDER BY `b`.cid DESC";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
	echo "<optgroup label='".$row['Year']."'>";
	echo "<option value='".$row['cid']."'>".$row['Category']."</option>";
	echo "</optgroup>";
}

I also tried joining them, but couldn't get it to work, as per the mySQL website. I'm betting that i have to join them, but what is the correct way?

Any help you can offer would be great.

~Brett

[bpat1434]

UPDATE
Okay, so I've modified my query, and it now looks like:

"SELECT a., b. FROM Years a, Categories b JOIN b ON a.yid = b.cyid ORDER BY b.cid DESC"

And with that I get the list, but each one has an optgroup around it. Here's my entire code:

$query = "SELECT * FROM `Years`, `Categories` WHERE `Years`.yid = `Categories`.cyid ORDER BY `Categories`.cid ASC";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
	echo "<optgroup label='".$row['Year']."'>";
	echo "<option value='".$row['cid']."'>".$row['Category']."</option>";
	echo "</optgroup>";
}

Any ideas how to group them so that there is one optgroup for each item that has the cyid = 1 (2004)? You know, so it looks like my post example above?

~Brett