correct architecture for completely general menus

[paulsbooker]

Hi Folks

My broad objective is to be able to constuct menus with arbitray numbers of subdirectories and menu items ie no constraints on the level of nesting that can occur

From a database point of view i figure their should be two tables one relating to the menu entries and the directory it belongs to and another relating to the directories themselves and what directories they belong to.

Having a clear perspective of how best to organise the tables it is then not clear to me how best to script the construction of the menu from the backend tables in the database

Has anyone had any experience in doing this, any insights you can share would be very much appreciated ?

Specifically i hope to use the menus from sothink.com and along with php be able to generate a menu structure drawing hierarchy information from a mysql database ?

Kind Regards

[yelvington]

One table only.

Siblings share common parents. Items that appear at the root have a NULL parent. Very simple.

[paulsbooker]

the database schema is fine, in detail i have two tables ....

menu_directories

parent_menu_directory_id
live
directory
menu_directory_id

menu_entries

menu_directory_id
live
entry
link
internal
menu_entry_id

question is how do you do the php scripting to construct these menus given
that the javascript that generates the menu is modularised and can form any menu structure desired

so what i am asking in broad terms is what is the approach that moves you towards a solutions , what we can't do at present is have a while for each subdirectory because the number of subdirectories is not predifined and if it was the degree of while nesting would also need to be scripted

the approach i am considering involves walking the directory structure in a manner reflecting how the menu is created although it is not clear to me at the moment how to convert this approach into an algorithm that i can them script

any insights would be kindly appreciated

paul