Counting answers

[Anon]

Hi,

I'm trying to make an own community, and of course it needs a forum. But I don't know how to count the answers to a topic. I want all answers to show (answers to answers to answers...), and I want the user to write answers at any "level". The code I thought would work turned out to be a never-ending loop (God knows why).

I use PHP and MySQL. The MySQL database looks like this:

--START--
id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
topic VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
contents LONGTEXT NOT NULL,
ref_id INT(11)
--END--

ref_id is the id for the "parent".

[fitzbean]

You might be close -- you need to use a specific type of function called Recursive. This type of function calls itself until it no longer finds any replies.

Topic messages should have a specific ref_id (like 0) and all replies should have the ref_id of the message it should be linked to (obviously).

It's quite complex to be honest, and goes beyond the scope of this question.

[Anon]

SELECT count(id) as count FROM table WHERE ref_id=$ref_id