Left Join With Where Clause

I need to retrieve all default settings from the settings table but also grab the character setting if exists for x character.

But this query is only retrieving those settings where character is = 1, not the default settings if the user havent setted anyone.

SELECT `settings`.*, `character_settings`.`value`
FROM (`settings`)
LEFT JOIN `character_settings` 
ON `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
WHERE `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1'  

So i should need something like this:

array(
    '0' => array('somekey' => 'keyname', 'value' => 'thevalue'),
    '1' => array('somekey2' => 'keyname2'),
    '2' => array('somekey3' => 'keyname3')
)

Where key 1 and 2 are the default values when key 0 contains the default value with the character value.

Solution 1:

The where clause is filtering away rows where the left join doesn't succeed. Move it to the join:

SELECT  `settings`.*, `character_settings`.`value`
FROM    `settings`
LEFT JOIN 
       `character_settings` 
ON     `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
        AND `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1'  

Solution 2:

When making OUTER JOINs (ANSI-89 or ANSI-92), filtration location matters because criteria specified in the ON clause is applied before the JOIN is made. Criteria against an OUTER JOINed table provided in the WHERE clause is applied after the JOIN is made. This can produce very different result sets. In comparison, it doesn't matter for INNER JOINs if the criteria is provided in the ON or WHERE clauses -- the result will be the same.

  SELECT  s.*, 
          cs.`value`
     FROM SETTINGS s
LEFT JOIN CHARACTER_SETTINGS cs ON cs.setting_id = s.id
                               AND cs.character_id = 1

Solution 3:

If I understand your question correctly you want records from the settings database if they don't have a join accross to the character_settings table or if that joined record has character_id = 1.

You should therefore do

SELECT `settings`.*, `character_settings`.`value`
FROM (`settings`)
LEFT OUTER JOIN `character_settings` 
ON `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
WHERE `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1' OR
`character_settings`.character_id is NULL