Mysql + php = Menu system

Gear_freak2000 · 06-07-2003, 10:37 AM

Hey.... My first post... So hey to everyone

!

ok... now the question....

What i want is to create menu that gets all its information from a database.... (easy)

But..... what i cant work out how to do is list things under categories....

let me explain some more...

say i have

CAT1 (CAT)
-- BOB1 (LINK)
-- BOB2
-- BOB3

CAT2
-- BILL1
-- BILL2
-- BILL3

CAT3
-- James1
-- James2
-- James3

i could do this by having a table for each CAT... But thats not what i want

.

I want to have all the links and CATS in 1 table... and i want to be able to easily reorder the cats and links.

So i had this idea:

CAT1 (type=1, pos=1.0)
-- BOB1 (type=0, pos=1.1)
-- BOB2 (type=0, pos=1.2)
-- BOB3 (type=0, pos=1.3)

CAT2 (type=1, pos=2.0)
-- BILL1 (type=0, pos=2.1)
-- BILL2 (type=0, pos=2.2)
-- BILL3 (type=0, pos=2.3)

CAT3 (type=1, pos=3.0)
-- James1 (type=0, pos=3.1)
-- James2 (type=0, pos=3.2)
-- James3 (type=0, pos=3.3)

To explain:

So.... type=1 lets sql/php know that its a CAT and type=0 lets it know that its a link....

pos = the position of the cat and the position of the link within the cat.... (still with me?)....

But i just cant understand how i will write the code to make this all work.....

Thanks ALOT for any help anyone can give me!

Obi Perrin · 06-08-2003, 06:37 AM

If I were doing this, I'd do it as two different tables. One named 'categories' and the other named 'subcategories'. Inventive huh?

In standard notation, each of the tables would be as following:

CATEGORIES(categoryid, name, position)
SUBCATEGORIES(subcategoryid, categoryid, subname, subposition)

So all categories would go in the categories table, and have a categoryid associated with them. When you're adding sub-categories to the database, the categoryid field in subcategories is filled in with the categoryid number of the category you want to add it to.

So your first step is to make these tables and fill them up with some data. Now comes the php script. I'm assuming you've covered some basic php and will hence focus on the more important sql/logical issues than syntax/commands. There's an excellent beginners tutorial at php.net for that.

Code:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM categories, subcategories WHERE categories.categoryid = subcategories.categoryid ORDER BY categories.position, subcategories.subposition";

$result = mysql_query($sql);
$myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result);

This would return all the menu entries in the two tables in the order we want them. What you need to do now is use a loop to iterate though all of the results until there are no more left, at which point the menu has ended.

Hope this helps somehow

Gear_freak2000 · 06-08-2003, 07:05 AM

thanks for the reply.... i managed to do it myself

! he he....

atnonis · 02-26-2009, 08:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gear_freak2000

thanks for the reply.... i managed to do it myself

! he he....

can u please post the solution?

thanks