Select multiple categories and subcategories

[johnie]

Hi.
I have a products catalog where i have unlimited categories and subcategories. All these are stored in a categories table with cat_id, parent_id and cat_name fields.

How can i have a select box with all the cats and subcats listed like this

ParentCat 1
ParentCat 1 > ItsSubCat 1
ParentCat 1 > ItsSubCat 1 > ItsSubSubCat 1
ParentCat 1 > ItsSubCat 1 > ItsSubSubCat 2
ParentCat 1 > ItsSubCat 2
ParentCat 2
ParentCat 2 > ItsSubCat 1

and so on ...

Thanks,
John

[dbchip2000]

I made this off the top of my head, so it may take a little debugging for you to get it. I'll use MySQL as the database server. It also assumes you already started your HTML select tag and that your parent_id is zero if it is a top level category

function show_categories($parent_id="0",$insert_text="") {
     $categories=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM categories WHERE parent_id=".$parent_id." ORDER BY cat_name");
     while ($category=mysql_fetch_array($categories)) {
          echo("<option name='".$category["cat_id"]."'>".$insert_text.$category["cat_name"]."</option>");
          show_categories($category["cat_id"],$insert_text."--");
     }
     return true;
}

show_categories();

It will take some debugging probably, since I haven't copied this from something I've tried

[tasistro]

Wouldn't selects who's content change based on previous selects be more practical?

[johnie]

What i want is a function where i pass a category ID and prints me all the subcategories tree at any depth.

What i do now is to get the parent category which has a cat_id and parent_id="0". The cat_id is the parent_id for the subcats.
I want to pass the cat_id to a function and create the tree like

Parent > Subcat1> subsubcat1 > sub.....

I looked into other applications but i couldn't find a clear and good way to do this.

Thanks,
John