partial schema retrieval

All comments welcome!

1. I have created a multi-record relational structure.
2. I retrieve records specified by a SQL stmt with >= 2 joins.
3. As records involved in the join are missing as the result of the
filters on some fields, no compund records are retrieved.
4. I am using PHP-MYSQL and column headers are not easily retrieved
without a hit- I cannot display an example record to the user.
5. I thought that if I could find out which records are missig through
creating and executing partial queries made up from the original SQL
stmt -
6. I could then create sample or dummy records and requery; displaying
these to the user.

a. Has any body done this before?
b. Can anybody recommend a recipe?
c. What area of design does this fall into - newsgroups/websites would
be helpful.

Thanks

Re: partial schema retrieval

reposted to comp.databases.mysql