Hey guys, I am a little stuck here, i know how to botch a solution together using a bunch of queries and PHP manipulation, but i am sure there is a more elegant way to do this one;
i have some tables (i won't put their full defs, just bits that are relevant (they are huge)) TABLE students FIELDS studentID fname lname title studentNo TABLE theses FIELDS thesisID studentID title TABLE thesis_reports FIELDS reportID thesisID year now, what we are dealing with here is records of theses and the reports that students are required to submit relating to them (yearly). i need to be able to pull up a record of students who have a record of a thesis (something in table "theses") but do NOT have an entry in "thesis_reports" for this year yet. an attempt at some SQL that sort of pretends to do the right thing :) SELECT DISTINCT(students.studentID), students.title, students.fname, students.lname, students.studentNo FROM students, theses, thesis_reports WHERE theses.studentID=students.studentID AND thesis_reports.thesisID=theses.thesisID AND thesis_reports.year != '2002' does that make sense? what it actually returns is just any student with any record in the DB under thesis_reports that doesn't eqal '2002', even if they happen to also have one that *is* for 2002 (ie. my test student has a report for 1999, 2001 and 2002, but still gets selected by that -- Beau Lebens, Technical Officer Science and Mathematics Education Centre Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987 Perth, Western Australia 6845 CRICOS provider code 00301J t: +61 8 9266-7297 (has voice-mail) f: +61 8 9266-2503 (ATT: Beau Lebens) e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: http://learnt.smec.curtin.edu.au/ -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php