SELECT... WHERE.... OR... ??? Possible?

Anon

I have a series of fields:

Cat1
SubCat1
Cat2
SubCat2
Cat3
SubCat3
etc. up to 5.

I want to SELECT from the database where $cat and $subcat match a pair above (but they must be the same number, not Cat1 and SubCat2 for example).

Before I added the extra cats, I had:

SELECT FROM sites WHERE Cat = '$cat' AND SubCat = '$subcat'

And I've tried loops and everything, but I'd really prefer to return them all in one go, because I run all sorts of stuff on the results and don't want to have to do it 5 times.

I've tried

SELECT FROM sites WHERE Cat1 = '$cat' AND SubCat1 = '$subcat' OR WHERE Cat2 = '$cat' AND SubCat2 = '$subcat'

but that doesn't seem to return anything at all.

Hope you can help, it's quite urgent, so I'd really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance,

Danny

Anon

..you shouldn't have 2 WHERE in a select,also try with paranthesis..<br>
SELECT FROM sites WHERE (Cat1 = '$cat' AND SubCat1 = '$subcat') OR (Cat2 = '$cat' AND SubCat2 = '$subcat' )

Anon

I was just thinking that myself!!

Thanks, I'm just gonna try it, and it you don't hear back, it worked! 🙂

Thanks again, you don't know how much I appreciate it! 🙂

Anon

Guess what...

IT WORKED!!! :o)

Thanks

Anon

That is good news. When the urgency of the moment has passed, and you have time to look into things, you should look into a redesign of your schema that does away with faked 'arrays' of columns like this, and move to a more fully normalized design.

Anon

Well I was going to us two tables, kinda relational thing, one would store all the info, and the other would store a list of SiteIDs and Cats & SubCats, but I couldn't be assed sorting out the extra table for now, so I just stuck Cat1, SubCat1 etc in.

The site could be a hell of a lot more efficient, eg it loads variables from a text file as
Logos And Tones|logos_and_tones
One being what is displayed, another being the path of the file, but I could have just had one and used str_replace to change it into the other....

Anyway, it works, which is the main thing. If the site begins to get really big and the inefficiency may become an issue, I'll sort it all out then.

Wow, I can write a lot when I get going huh?!!!

Danny
http://MyBest50.com