formatting text via a database

[paulmcnally]

I am looking for a way to insert articles into a page. The page is templated, therefor the content changes whilst the structure remains consistent. No problem there. The part I am unsure of is that if the article contains, 1 heading, x sub headings, x paragraphs and x photos how do I build the database? Is it one table row per page, or joined tables? Or some other solution. I suspect there will be a lot of pre-processing via the content management system before I update.

Thanks,
paul

[Roger_Ramjet]

As far as the text goes, it will really depend on how you do the input, or more likely who is going to do the input. You can store your text along with the html tags for heading <h1> paragraph <p> etc in a text field.? With embedded tags, you can store the whole article in one field if that will work in your situation. Question then is, how do you generate those tags in the first place? Will you type them in as you type the text

Photos should be stored as files in a subdirectory, just store the file name in your db. You can store them in a blob field, but it is not the best solution.

The absolute db solution is of course multiple tables:

tblArticles
article_id
heading

tblParagraphs
para_id
article_id
sub_head
text

tblPix
pic_id
para_id
file_name
hieght (to help with the formatting)
width (although you may want x,y relative co-ordinates instead)
title

Should do the trick. Each article will have multiple entries in the paragraphs table, and each paragraph can have none, one, or more than one picture.

This is the most flexible as it allows you to focus on the content during input and someone with no html can do it.

[paulmcnally]

Thanks Roger,
the database structure was what I was looking for. I was possibly using clob (character large objects), but this looks better. One thng I have started using is a column called 'alt' for text images' alt tag and one called summary for table summary attribute. Just a good practice thing.