JOIN Query while loading comments - php

Question

I'm loading comments for product with id = '3'
$get_comments = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM products_comments WHERE product_id = '3'");
Now I want to add the "report abuse" option for each comment, for this purpose I'm having another table as "abuse_reports" which user abuse reports will be stored in this table, now if a user reported a comment, the report abuse option should not be there for that comment for that user there anymore, for this I'm doing:
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($get_comments)){
echo blah blah blah // comment details
// now for checking if this user should be able to report this or not, i make this query again:
$check_report_status = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(id) FROM abuse_reports WHERE reporter_user_id = '$this_user_id' AND product_id = 'this_product_id'");
// blah blah count the abuse reports which the current user made for this product
if($count == 0) echo "<a>report abuse</a>";
}
With the above code, for each comment I'm making a new query, and that's obviously wrong, how I should join the second query with the first one?
Thanks

Answer 1

Updated query (that is working now, commited by questioner)
SELECT pc. * , count( ar.`id` ) AS `abuse_count`
FROM `products_comments` pc
LEFT OUTER JOIN `abuse_reports` ar ON pc.`id` = ar.`section_details`
AND ar.`reporter_id` = '$user_id'
WHERE pc.`product_id` = '$product_id'
GROUP BY pc.`id`
LIMIT 0 , 30
The query works as follow: You select all the fields of your products_comments with the given product_id but you also count the entries of abuse_reports for the given product_id. Now you LEFT JOIN the abuse_reports, which means that you access that table and hang it on to the left (your products_comments table). The OUTER allows that there is no need for a value in the abuse_reports table, so if there is no report you get null, and therefore a count of 0.
Please read this:
However, I needed to group the results, otherwise you get only one merged row as result. So please extend your products_comments with a field comment_id of type int that is the primary key and has auto_increment.
UPDATE: abuse count
Now you can do two things: By looping through the results, you can see for each single element if it has been reported by that user or not (that way you can hide abuse report links for example). If you want the overall number of reports, you just increase a counter variable which you declare outside the loop. Like this:
$abuse_counter = 0;
while($row = mysql....)
{
$abuse_counter += intval($row['abuse_count']); // this is 1 or 0
// do whatever else with that result row
}
echo 'The amount of reports: '.$abuse_counter;
Just a primitive sample

Answer 2

I believe your looking for a query something like this.
SELECT pc.*, COUNT(ar.*)
FROM products_comments AS pc
LEFT JOIN abuse_reports AS ar ON reporter_user_id = pc.user_id AND ar.product_id = pc.product_id
WHERE product_id = '3'"

Answer 3

try this SQL
SELECT pc.*, COUNT(ar.id) AS abuse_count
FROM products_comments pc
LEFT JOIN abuse_reports ar ON pc.product_id = ar.product_id
WHERE pc.product_id = '3' AND ar.reporter_user_id = '$this_user_id'
GROUP BY pc.product_id
The result is list of products_comments with abuse_reports count if exist for reporter_user_id