Do something different if more than one consecutively?

[sciencebear]

I'm running a query that grabs all the info from several rows of a table called updates. Updates has a column called "type,"  among other columns. For simplicity, we'll say the types are a, b, c, d, and e. There is also another column, user, which says which user is attached to which update. The query takes each row in order from most recent to least. It works great. However, I want to do something different if there are more than one of a specific type from a certain user in a row. Like this

 

type user

a      1

b      2

c      1

c      1

d    1

d    2

e    1

 

I would like to instead of showing:

 

"1 did a"

"2 did b"

"1 did c"

"1 did c"

"1 did d"

"2 did d"

"1 did e"

 

Show something like this:

 

"1 did a"

"2 did b"

"1 did c twice"

"1 did d"

"2 did d"

"1 did e"

 

Any suggestions?

 

Sorry if I'm not making a lot of sense. If you have questions, I can try to answer them.

 

 

[aeroswat]

Look into using the COUNT function of mysql to solve what you are trying to do.

[jl5501]

select user,type,count(type) from updates group by type order by user

[sciencebear]

Doesn't count count all the elements though? Perhaps I was not being specific enough. I only want to do something different if there are more than one consecutively, so if there was another instance at a different time I don't want to change it.

 

If there's not a plausible way to do that, all the entries have time stamps attached to them. I could settle for doing something different if the time stamps are with a certain amount of time, even if not consecutive, but I don't know how I'd do that either.

[aeroswat]

Doesn't count count all the elements though? Perhaps I was not being specific enough. I only want to do something different if there are more than one consecutively, so if there was another instance at a different time I don't want to change it.

 

If there's not a plausible way to do that, all the entries have time stamps attached to them. I could settle for doing something different if the time stamps are with a certain amount of time, even if not consecutive, but I don't know how I'd do that either.

 

Have you tried jl's recommendation?

[sciencebear]

Have you tried jl's recommendation?

 

I'm trying it right now. Unfortunately, that only results in a row for each different type once, and gives a user along with the total count for that type for every user. I'm not sure how I would implement that to do what I need.

[sciencebear]

Hmm... I got close with this:

 

SELECT *,COUNT(type) FROM updates GROUP BY user,type,date ORDER BY id DESC

 

This does what I want except the time period is an entire day instead of only 20-30 minutes apart.