GROUP_CONCAT with ordering and missing fields - php

Question

I have a series of tables that I want to get rows returned from in the following format:
Student ID | Last Name | First Name | Quiz Scores
-------------------------------------------------
xxxxxxx | Snow | Jon | 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
There's 3 relevant tables (changing any existing DB structure is not an option):
person - table of all people in the organization
enrollment - table of student and faculty enrollment data
tilt.quiz - table of quiz scores, with each row storing an individual score
The tricky part of this is the Quiz Scores. A row for the quiz score only exists if the student has taken a the quiz. Each quiz row has a module, 1 - 8. So possible quiz data for a student could be (each of these being a separate row):
person_id | module | score
---------------------------
223355 | 1 | 100
223355 | 2 | 95
223355 | 4 | 80
223355 | 7 | 100
I need the quiz scores returned in proper order with 8 comma separated values, regardless if any or all of the quizzes are missing.
I currently have the following query:
SELECT
person.id,
first_name,
last_name,
GROUP_CONCAT(tilt.quiz.score) AS scores
FROM person
LEFT JOIN enrollment ON person.id = enrollment.person_id
LEFT JOIN tilt.quiz ON person.id = tilt.quiz.person_id
WHERE
enrollment.course_id = '$num' AND enrollment_status_id = 1
GROUP BY person.id
ORDER BY last_name
The problems with this are:
It does not order the quizzes by module
If any of the quizzes are missing it simply returns fewer values
So I need the GROUP_CONCAT scores to at least include commas for missing quiz values, and have them ordered correctly.
The one solution I considered was creating a temporary table of the quiz scores, but I'm not sure this is the most efficient method or exactly how to go about it.
EDIT: Another solution would be to execute a query to check for the existence of each quiz individually but this seems clunky (a total of 9 queries instead of 1); I was hoping there was a more elegant way.
How would this be accomplished?

Answer 1

There are some assumptions here about your data structure, but this should be pretty close to what you're after. Take a look at the documentation for GROUP_CONCAT and COALESCE.
SELECT `person`.`id`, `person`.`first_name`, `person`.`last_name`,
GROUP_CONCAT(
COALESCE(`tilt`.`quiz`.`score`, 'N/A')
ORDER BY `tilt`.`quiz`.`module_id`
) AS `scores`
FROM `person`
CROSS JOIN `modules`
LEFT JOIN `enrollment` USING (`person_id`)
LEFT JOIN `tilt`.`quiz` USING (`person_id`, `module_id`)
WHERE (`enrollment`.`course_id` = '$num')
AND (`enrollment`.`enrollment_status_id` = 1)
GROUP BY `person`.`id`
ORDER BY `person`.`last_name`

Answer 2

First thing to do is use the IFNULL() function on the score
Then, use ORDER BY inside the GROUP_CONCAT
Here is my proposed query
SELECT
person.id,
first_name,
last_name,
GROUP_CONCAT(IFNULL(tilt.quiz.score,0) ORDER BY tilt.quiz.module) AS scores
FROM person
LEFT JOIN enrollment ON person.id = enrollment.person_id
LEFT JOIN tilt.quiz ON person.id = tilt.quiz.person_id
WHERE
enrollment.course_id = '$num' AND enrollment_status_id = 1
GROUP BY person.id
ORDER BY last_name