BuildMyWeb

thx jaques. there are a couple dozen status values. as we near the end, most of those 24 values will be what we are after. you would still advocate for enumerating them in a long list within the query? WHERE status IN ('NOT_STARTED', 'WORK_IN_PROGRESS', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah', 'blah blah blah')

i did consider it. maybe didnt handle it well tho what i have done is assigned status codes by factors of 100, like thus: 100 - not started 200 - work in progress 300 - completed so if my boss assigned more, i could fit them in 210 - temporarily on hold 220 - cancelled i imagine you would still advocate against numerics tho so what is a better way to handle this?

yes, my status values are from a numerical array established in the application. i dont understand why this is a problem. id be happy to come back and read if you were willing to take the time to explain a bit more. or we could always take it to private messaging. i like to learn "better ways" to do things but i just understand what the problem is in this case.

yep, that was it barand. thank you for all of the help. forgot your query changed the order and i didnt reflect it in my bind params. everything seems to be good now. appreciate the help. and im going to read up some more on JOINs. i knew i was limiting what i could accomplish by not explicitly writing JOINs but didnt realize my implied JOINs were obsolete and to be avoided.

ive started reading up a bit on LEFT JOIN. i better understand jaques point now about including missing rows in the joined table. when i implement barand's query, i get no results returned when i think there should be. $query = " SELECT ua.id, ua.security_key, ua.creation, ua.last_login, ua.f_name, ua.l_name, ua.email, ua.title, ua.org_name, ua.org_size, ua.manage_num, ua.manage_direct_num, ua.phone, se.status FROM user_accts AS ua LEFT JOIN sessions AS se ON se.author_id = ua.id AND se.status < ? WHERE ( $search_filter >= ? AND $sear

thanks guys. particularly barand for the example. i will review JOINs and come back to this thread.

i have two relational tables with aliases 'ua' and 'se'. most data is pulled from the ua table in this query. but, if a record exists in the se table for this user (user ID is compared in both tables to find a match) we want the value in the 'status' column of the se table. if there is no matching author ID in the se table, we will provide a default value of something like 'No Match'. im not sure of a good way to go about this. the problem that arises with my query below is that if there is no record in the se table with a matching author.id, we dont get the values from the ua table e

i don't understand what youre saying you want to do or, really, what your question even is. you should paste your code attempt here, tell us what youre trying to achieve, and where its going wrong.

you should probably read up on php FUNCTIONS. when a function is declared, it is set with a number of parameters. some required, some optional. when you call the function, as you are doing in your script with mail(); , you can only call with all required parameters. you have the option to use or not use "optional" parameters. http://php.net/manual/en/functions.arguments.php try this: mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);