Hi there!

I think I brought a similar issue to your attention once before and wanted to see if anything has been done to address it.  It is something that has been bothering me for months now and I seem to have run out of workarounds.  The table, which uses foreign keys to match teachers and students (IDs to names) works fine on the back end but is stuck on the loader on the front end.  What seems to be the issue is CONCAT, which I use to merge the first and last names in the related tables—works fine if I select either last or first name without concatenating them.

However, what puzzles me is that it works great on the back end but not on the front and since there are multiple entries that share last names, I really need to be able to tell them apart.

Thanks for the support,

Rok

Hi there,

So it turns out that what broke the table was a corrupted entry in one of my tables.  Still, I wonder why it would only break on the front end.

Best,

Rok

Hi Miloš,

I have a table that records links between students and teachers.  Each record pulls data from two different tables—one containing students and the other teachers—based on a unique ID.  The table would break whenever I tried to set up foreign key to a table containing a concatenated full name and display it on the front end.  Please note that it only broke on the front end, not the back, when I enabled editing (it worked fine as view-only).

The "reference table" contained the column

concat(lname, ' ',fname, ' ',state) as fullname

On how I discovered it, I got lucky after a while.  As a temporary fix, I just limited the reference to the teacher's last name.  However, my client needs to choose the appropriate teacher from a drop-down menu, which presented a problem in case of namesakes (over 5000 records).  After cleaning up trailing spaces from all entries (70+ columns), I tried setting up a concat column directly in WPDT, in phpmyadmin, and even by creating a view (that obviously didn't work) without success.

I needed to come up with a workaround including an additional identifier beyond the last name so I just tried concatenating it with different columns, which worked.  This is how I managed to narrow the problem down to a corrupted record in the first name column.  From there, it was just a matter of finding anything weird so I ran

SELECT id, fname
FROM teachers
WHERE fname REGEXP '[^a-zA-Z ]';

at which point I was left with about 100 records and one of them turned out to contain two dots (something like johny..cash).  Removing them did it.

Hope this helps!