Trees - were folders and items have different properties

samueljonasson

Hi,

I was wondering if I am making things to complicated. In my application (CMS) I am working with a lot of trees as can be expected. There is a tree for the website, one for the images, the news, files, users an more.

In the old days I used to build the trees from just one table - so that if an item had children it would become a folder. This makes perfect sense when working on the tree for the site it self - since all items (parents or children) share the same properties - all are just webpages.

But let's say that the tree represents newsletter. Each folder is a newsletter and items in the folders are issues. In that case the parent and child don't share the same properties.

What I did was that I had two tables for each "type of content" like this.

newsletters_folders
newsletters

images_folders
images

...and so on. There are good things about going this way - and there are bad things.

My question is - is this the right way? Is there a more elegant way? How do you do it?

Regards,
Samúel

samueljonasson

Shame on me for replying to myself!

But I would really like to hear the experienced php programmer's view on this matter.

As I said, a single table is fine for building trees for pages and discussion threads and such, where the child and parent share the same properties.

How do you go about when that is not the case, like in the case of newsletters and issues? Two tables? One table with fields that satisfy the needs of both newsletters and the issues?

Any input would be appreciated.

Regards,
Sambo

Jack_Slocum

Personally I would just use a type_id in the table to specify pre-defined content types instead of making new tables for every type. You could define your pre-defined content types as either constants or even better in a seperate table w/ a little admin so it is very easy to add new content types.