mysql query with AND, OR and NOT

Question

Lets say I have a table of articles with as many to many relationship with topics. Each topic assigned to an article has a type field which can contain 1 of 3 values AND, NOT, and OR.

Articles
   id
   ....

Topics
   id
   ....

ArticleTopics
   article_id
   topic_id
   type

I want to create a query that says returns all articles that have:

ALL of the following topics: 1, 2, 3 (AND association)
   AND
ANY of the following topics: 4, 5, 6 (OR association)
   AND
NONE of the following topics 7, 8 (NOT association)

How do I go about creating this query?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The ALL and NOT parts are very simple, you just chain them with ANDs:

SELECT X FROM Y WHERE a AND b AND c AND NOT d AND e AND NOT e.

And the ORs go between:

SELECT X FROM Y WHERE ((a AND b AND c) AND (d OR e OR f)) AND NOT g AND NOT h

replace small numbers with comparisons and you're done. So if you want to do this in code, sort your conditions and then just chain them together as a String. Be careful to avoid SQL-Insertions.

Answer 2

If I get this correctly

    SELECT * FROM ArticleTopics where type = 'AND'
UNION
    SELECT * FROM ArticleTopics where type = 'OR' limit 1

I assume by 'any' you mean 'any one'. You can join the articles to topics yourself, that's trivial.

Answer 3

SELECT a.id, a.name 
  FROM Articles a, ArticleTopics arto
  WHERE arto.article_id = a.id 
    AND 
      ((arto.topic_id = 1 AND arto.type like 'AND') AND (arto.topic_id = 2 AND arto.type like 'AND') AND (arto.topic_id = 3 AND arto.type like 'AND')) 
    AND
      ((arto.topic_id = 4 AND arto.type like 'OR') AND (arto.topic_id = 5 AND arto.type like 'OR') AND (arto.topic_id = 6 AND arto.type like 'OR'))
    AND
      ((arto.topic_id = 7 AND arto.type like 'NOT') AND (arto.topic_id = 8 AND arto.type like 'NOT'))