How to get records from below tables - mysql

Question

I have 3 tables
QUESTION table with below 2 properties
1. ID (serial)
2. Question (varchar)
ANSWER table with below 4 properties
1. ID (serial)
2. QuestionID (foreign key to table QUESTION)
3. StudentID (foreign key to table STUDENT)
4. ANSWER (varchar)
5. SubmitDateTime (datetime)
STUDENT table with below properties
1. ID (serial)
2. Name (varchar)
I just want to show records with each student (one record for each student) with every answer. If any question's answer is not given by the student it will show blank.
For example:
QUESTION TABLE
| ID | QUESTION |
|----- | --------- |
| 1 | A FOR? |
| 2 | B FOR? |
| 3 | C FOR? |
ANSWER TABLE
| ID | QuestionID | StudentID | ANSWER | SubmitDateTime |
|----- | ----------- |------------|--------|----------------|
| 1 | 1 | 1 |Apple | something date |
| 2 | 1 | 2 |Ant | something date |
| 3 | 2 | 1 |Book | something date |
| 4 | 3 | 2 |Cat | something date |
STUDENT TABLE
| ID | NAME |
|----- | --------- |
| 1 | Jhon |
| 2 | Lily |
Expected Records
Result table
| ID | NAME | Answers |
|----- | --------- | ---------------------|
| 1 | Jhon | Apple,Book,<blank> |
| 2 | Lily | Ant,<blank>,Cat |
"blank" means no record will be shown instead of a blank space or a hyphane.
My implementation:
SELECT s.ID,s.Name,
GROUP_CONCAT(a.answer SEPARATOR ',') AS answers
FROM student AS s
LEFT JOIN answer AS a ON a.studentID=s.ID
WHERE a.submitdate BETWEEN '<somedate>' AND '<somedate>'
GROUP BY s.ID ORDER BY a.ID ASC
It does not give me a blank answer. How to get these?

Answer 1

Try this:
SELECT sid, sname, GROUP_CONCAT(IFNULL(a.answer,'-') ORDER BY qid)
FROM
(SELECT q.id AS qid, s.id AS sid, s.Name AS sname
FROM question q CROSS JOIN student s) qs
LEFT JOIN answer a ON qs.qid=a.QuestionID AND qs.sid=a.StudentID
GROUP BY sid, sname;
The base query is a CROSS JOIN between question and student tables that will be a subquery and give a result like this:
+-----+-----+-------+
| qid | sid | sname |
+-----+-----+-------+
| 1 | 2 | Lily |
| 1 | 1 | Jhon |
| 2 | 2 | Lily |
| 2 | 1 | Jhon |
| 3 | 2 | Lily |
| 3 | 1 | Jhon |
+-----+-----+-------+
As you can see, each of the student will be paired with all of the existing question regardless of their answer records in answer table. This will be the reference for the LEFT JOIN with answer table.
Demo fiddle