Creating a forum - Help with SQL Please

mbrown174

Hello,
Just started building my first forum with php and mysql. I currently have two tables - one called forum and one called users. I have managed to get the forum displaying records and have got a record insertion page running.

My question is how do I get details such as email added to the record that is inserted. I want users of the forum to be able to click on the name of a user and then be able to email that person.

This is my code -

Posted By <span class="style28"><a href="mailto:"><?php echo $row_Forum['User']; ?></a></span> at <?php echo $row_Forum['TimeofPost']; ?></span>

The forum table has a user column and a time of post column, both of these are displayed when an item is posted on the main forum page. However the email column is stored in the users table. I want to place a variable on the first line where it says mailto. This variable would search for a specific email using the username($row_Forum['User'].

I think this might require a join, I have never done this before and so I am bit confused. Thanks for any help!

stolzyboy

Do you have a primary key in the forum table and an associated foreign key in the users table?

If so, you can do something like:

$id = $row_Forum['id']; //this would be the primary key field of forum

SELECT emailcolumn FROM usertable WHERE userid = $id;

You can do it that way, or you can select it in your main query like

SELECT forumtable.*, usertable.emailcolumn where blah and blah and forumtable.id = usertable.userid

Hopefully, this will give you the idea on what you need or can do.

mbrown174

Thanks for the reply - loking into it now!