[Diggory Laycock]

I've taken up PHP/SQL recently - I was wondering if someone could answer a question:

Imagine the following tables:

Code:
Foo
ID	FooName		pictureID			Description
1	hello		1			Hello World

Picture
ID	Name		PictureFileName		Description
1	helloPic		hello.jpg			A picture of Hello

I've been using something like the following (simplified) code:

Code:
…
$query="SELECT * FROM Foo, Picture WHERE foo.pictureID=Picture.id"

$result = mysql_query ( $query, $connection);

while ($resultObject=mysql_fetch_object($result))
		{
			echo "Foo name: $resultObject->FooName";
			echo "some other value: $resultObject->name";
		}
…

the code works - but if I were to try and extract $resultObject->Description then it wouldn't work - because there are Description attributes in both tables.

I am currently solving this by using a NameSpace for table attributes like so:

attributeTitle = TableName+AttributeTitle

so Description (in the Foo table) becomes FooDescription and Description in the Picture table becomes PictureDescription. - Similarly id becomes - FooID or PictureID.

This works, but attribute names quickly become very long.

Basically my question is this:

Is this the right way of going about it?

[el_humpo]

Well, I always use standard column names in my tables and alias them in my queries, like so:

Code:
$res = mysql_query("select foo.*, foo.description as foodesc, picture.*
    from foo, picture where foo.pictureid=picture.id", $link);

while($row = @mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
    print("foo description: ".$row['foodesc']);
    print("picture description: ".$row['description']);
}

It makes your SQL queries longer, but I find it easier to manage my database if the tables use a standard naming convention. And you don't need to go back and rename your tables or columns if you have a namespace conflict later.

[Diggory Laycock]

Thanks so much - I had no Idea you could alias column names.