Combining data between three tables - php

Question

I'm creating a site (For School Purpose) where you can buy stuff from different companies.
On one of the sites I want to show all the companies, but only the companies from the category and the city you have chosen.
But I also want it to be ordered by popularity.
For every time a person is buying something, the popularity of the company in the chosen category and city will be raised by 1.
The categories are: Men, Women and Family.
For this, I'm using three tables:
Table 1 - partners
| partner_id | name | type | logo |
In the first table I have the company names, type and logo.
This table is only used to get the name, type and logo from each company.
Table 2 - single_partners
| id | partner_id | address | zipcode | city |
In the second table I have all companies in the entire country.
If one compay is located multiple times in one city, there will be multiple rows, but with a different id, address, zipcode and city. The partner_id will be the same of course.
Table 3 - partner_pupolarity
| id | partner_id | men | women | family |
In the third table the popularity of each company will be.
Here each company from every city will be stored with a popularity value (men, women and family). If the company have no popularity in any of the three categories, it won't be stored in the table.
I can show each companies from each city, but I cannot sort it by popularity according to the category.
Heres is an quick example of what I want:
On the first site you can choose a category: Men, Women or Family.
When you have chosen a category, you are going to choose a city by typing the zip-code.
Then you're going to see a list where the most popular companies will be shown, sorted by the category you have chosen, and the city. If a company exist multiple times in the same city, it should only show one.
If you have chosen Men and City 1, you will se the most popular companies from the men category in City 1.
If a company do not have any popularity value from that category, it will be in the bottom of the companies.
What I can do now is only to show the companies according to the city you have chosen, but I can's sort them by popularity.
This is what I have tried:
// Load partners
$load_partners = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM partners");
while($partners = mysql_fetch_array($load_partners)) {
$partner_id = $partners['partner_id'];
$partner_name = $partners['name'];
$partner_logo = $partners['logo'];
$partner_logo_dir = "media/partners/";
$load_single_partners = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT '$partner_name' FROM single_partners WHERE partner_id='$partner_id' and postal='5000'");
while($single_partners = mysql_fetch_array($load_single_partners)) {
$single_partners_id = $single_partners['partner_id'];
echo '<div class="partner" style="background: url('.$partner_logo_dir.$partner_logo.'); background-size: cover;" data-partner-id="'.$partner_id.'">'.$partner_name.'
</div>'."\n";
$order_partners = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM partner_popularity WHERE partner_id = '$single_partners_id'");
while($order = mysql_fetch_array($order_partners)) {
}
}
}
I think I somehow should combine the data from the three tables but I do not know how.
..or am I doing it all wrong by using three different tables?
Hope you can understand by question :)

Answer 1

What you can do to achieve this is using joins : Here is some MySQL doc about this
But here, using 2 tables for single partners and popularity is not really needed, since one line of single_partners is strictly equal to one line of partner_popularty, you can put them in the same table. You should put them in the same table, and using a default of zero if the partner has no popularity registered, so it'll show last when sorting by popularity.
So, then you'll have 2 tables :
Table 1 - partners
| partner_id | name | type | logo |
Table 2 - single_partners
| id | partner_id | address | zipcode | city | pop_men | pop_women | pop_family
Now your query to select all that becomes extremely simple (just select the partners, filter the city, order them and you're done), and with a little grouping and a join, you can also select partners sorted by popularity summarized in all cities :
SELECT p.*,
SUM(pop_men) AS total_pop_men,
SUM(pop_women) AS total_pop_women,
SUM(pop_family) AS total_pop_family
FROM partners p
JOIN single_partners sp ON sp.partner_id = p.partner_id
GROUP BY partner_id
ORDER BY total_pop_men DESC,
total_pop_women DESC,
total_pop_family DESC

Answer 2

SELECT partners.name FROM partners, single_partners, partner_popularity
WHERE single_partners.name = 'cityname' AND partners.id = single_partners.partner_id AND
partners.id = partner_populariry.partner_id ORDER BY partner_popularity.[category]
As far as i can understand this is what your looking for, or something similar, i dont really understand the whole meaning of it, it this select you will have to do three diferent ones, one for each category.
Sorry if i didn't help.