[RESOLVED] Did I do this LEFT JOIN right?

[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

PS
I posted this in the coding forum first, that may have been the wrong place.

[sneakyimp]

The SELECT part of your query specifically requests the project_types field from the projects table and the cat_name from the categories table.

What is kind of confusing to me is that you are grouping by project_types. GROUP BY should only be used when you are combining records by adding values or calculating an average or some similar operation that combines values from different records. Try removing the GROUP BY clause and see if that looks better?

[TechMistress]

Ok, great. I worked this out. I found an issue with the data, some of the id numbers no longer existed in both tables.

arrggg.

Thanks so much for the help! I agree about the group, and removing that made it smoother.