Left outer join query (i think)

Question

I have two tables that look like this:

Products: id category name description active

Sales_sheets: id product_id link

product_id is a foreign key from the products id table

I wrote a prepared statement JOIN like this which works:

SELECT p.name, p.description, s.link FROM products AS p
INNER JOIN sales_sheets AS s ON p.id = s.product_id WHERE active=1 AND category=?

Basically a product can have a link to a PDF, but not every product will have a sales sheet. So if i try to bring up a product which doesn't have a sales sheet attached to it then it always returns no rows.

So i thought I'd have to use a LEFT OUTER JOIN in place of the INNER JOIN, but that returns no rows too, am I naming the tables in the wrong order? I've never had to use an OUTER join before?

Answer 1

SELECT p.name, p.description, s.link FROM products p
LEFT JOIN sales_sheets s ON p.id = s.product_id
WHERE active = 1 && category = ?