Generating HierArrays.js dynamically?

Anon

Has anyone here generated the HierArrays.js file dynamically through PHP and MySQL? I am wondering if my database schema is going to work, and how well the output will work.

HierArrays.js is the content component of the HierMenus DHTML navigation tool being developed at http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/

Thank you.

saloon12yrd

Hi,

yeah I thought about this a while ago:
It shouldn't be too complicated since HierMenu stores the information in the structure of a tree which is quite easily implemented in a database.
You'd need to store the structure of your site in a table like this:

TABLE contenttree (
id INT UNSIGNED DEFAULT '0',
parent INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL
);

Now imagine you have a section named "News" and say this section subsections "Science", "Politics" and "Local".
Now you store "News" in the table above - say it gets id "1".
When you store each subsection you insert "1" as "parent". like this you create a tree just like the one HierMenu needs.
To get the full name of the Array you'd SELECT all the way down until there is a section with "parent=0" - this is the root.

You can even go further and create a second table that stores articles, news, links(!), ... and references them to the "id" of a section.

This should work quite well but I decided not to implement this because it just ain't worth the effort IMHO - how often do you change the structure of your site?
I see a slight chance of need if you really want to link directly to some kind of content (as described with the second table) though.

Hope that helps a little,

Dominique

Anon

I had thought of doing it this way as well. It gets complicated though if you go down more than one level. So I came up with a structure that included a parent and child table. Wasn't working exactly how I wanted it to though, so now I am reading an article on recursion, but it relates to building a forum like this one. I may be able to adapt. The reason I want to do it is that I am trying to build a content management system for one of my clients so they can add new pages as they feel the need. I could arbitrarily lock the number of child menus, but I'd rather not do this...

saloon12yrd

Doing a CMS for myself right now I must say: Don't do it. You get very far very soon (multi-user, stages, multi-site, languages, templates, media-handling, ...) but in the end it gets hard.
Of course it's a good study and stuff but there are a lot good free CMSs based on PHP which suit standard needs quite well. As for me I'm out of luck - I haven't found one to fit ;(
But I understand that you do it for a client, so maybe you don't have a choice so I'll try to be productive 🙂

I don't see your problem in more than one level. To get from one leaf section down to the root (which is easier than root to leaf and results in the same) I use something like this:
The leaf has a $parent so I can do a loop:

do {
  // database abstractionlayer here,
  // returns the parent group in $mg
  $dblib->s_mediagroup($parent, &$mg);
  $id = $mg['id'];
  $parent = $mg['parent'];
  $p = $id . "/" . $p;
} while ($parent != 0);

This loop stops when it finds a group (in $mg) whose $parent equals zero (so it's a root entry).
in $p I then have a directory path which in my case is just what I need since I store the media in directories matching the databases treelike structure.
In your case I'd change it to an array though.

Looks a little weird, esp. because of the abstractionlayer but it's pretty straight forward and should work for all treelike structures.

Greets,

Dominique

Anon

I agree, but for what I want to do, there is also no fit. We are talking about really basic CMS here, so it isn't that big of a deal.

I think I hit on a workable solution using some nested queries. Retaining two tables, and doing it like this:

$sqlb = "SELECT DISTINCT parentid FROM children ORDER BY parentid";
$resultb = mysql_query($sqlb);
while ($myrowb = mysql_fetch_array($resultb)) {
$sqlc = "SELECT title, url, isurl, permhl, haschild FROM children WHERE parentid='$myrowb[parentid]' ORDER BY sequence";
$resultc = mysql_query($sqlc);
echo "\nHM_Array1_".$myrowb[parentid]." = [
[]";
while ($myrowc = mysql_fetch_array($resultc)) {
printf(",
[\"$myrowc[title]\",\"$myrowc[url]\",$myrowc[isurl],$myrowc[permhl],$myrowc[haschild]");
}
echo "]";
}

Works good so far, just need to keep sequence issues in mind when building the menu maintenace tool.