This may or may not be obvious to people but perhaps it will help someone.
When running joins in SQL you may encounter a problem if you are trying to pull two columns with the same name. mysqli returns the last in the query when called by name. So to get what you need you can use an alias.
Below I am trying to join a user id with a user role. in the first table (tbl_usr), role is a number and in the second is a text name (tbl_memrole is a lookup table). If I call them both as role I get the text as it is the last "role" in the query. If I use an alias then I get both as desired as shown below.
<?php
$sql = "SELECT a.uid, a.role AS roleid, b.role,
FROM tbl_usr a
INNER JOIN tbl_memrole b
ON a.role = b.id
";
if ($result = $mysqli->query($sql)) {
while($obj = $result->fetch_object()){
$line.=$obj->uid;
$line.=$obj->role;
$line.=$obj->roleid;
}
}
$result->close();
unset($obj);
unset($sql);
unset($query);
?>
In this situation I guess I could have just renamed the role column in the first table roleid and that would have taken care of it, but it was a learning experience.
