[RESOLVED] What did I do wrong with Left Join?

[TechMistress]

Hello Everyone,

I've got a snippet of code that is not resulting in what I want.

I have 2 tables.
table 1 is projects, holds project info and project_types (category ids)
table 2 is categories, holds category ids and category names

My snippet of code here is showing the category/project_type id instead of the category_name. What did I do wrong?

SELECT p.project_types, c.cat_name FROM projects p LEFT JOIN categories c ON p.project_types = c.cat_id GROUP BY p.project_types ORDER BY c.cat_name ASC

[ixalmida]

Looks like you posted to the wrong message group, but I'll respond anyway...

I tried your code and it worked perfectly for me on a few of my tables (where MyGroups is a numeric list of all the groups that users belong to, and Groups is the lookup table for the numeric listing):

SELECT p.group_id, c.group_name FROM MyGroups p
  LEFT JOIN Groups c ON p.group_id = c.group_id
  GROUP BY p.group_id ORDER BY c.group_name ASC;

This returned something similar to the following:

1, Admin
4, All Employees
3, Engineering
7, Operations
6, Project Management
2, Sales
5, Service

So what's the problem?

[TechMistress]

Yes, you're right. I was forced to look at my data, and the problem was with the data itself. There were cat id's that no longer existed. Fixing them, fixed the problem.

Thank you!