Easiest way of displaying large amounts of data

jmorin

Hi Peeps. I've run into a situation where i'm hoping php could reduce the time to create this project. First of i have linux based server, mySQL server... Now what i'm trying to do is create an online catalog which has about 300 different types of clothing. Heiarchi goes Category of clothes (t- shirts), brand (hanes), then style (long sleeve). As you can imagine there could be tons of choices. each specific item has its own page that has a picture and description on the page.

What would the most practical way of doing this besides making a website for each item?

each heiarchi has its own directory. t-shirts/hanes/long_sleeve/1279.htm

sigh any help would be apreciated. Thanks

thorpe

huge question really, but the easiest thing would probably be to come up with a database design that would hold all your data except the images (i would store a filepath to these in the db), from there you could make one php page that could handle the whole lot.

i assume you wanted some more precise answers, but honestly thats all ive got. if you dont know php and are interested in learning it so you can build this app, may i suggest a good, free, online book. if your not interested in learning php, and just want the project done, you might try searching over at hotscripts.

jmorin

Thanks, i'm pretty familiar with PHP. I think i'm just over thinking the answer. I can do it with a db but then again its a tedious job. all though i do have some of the items in a excel format, and i have read something about INSERTing excel docs into mySQL. Well thanks I guess i just need to put a little elbow greese into the job and hire someone to inset the data haha.

bbreslauer

Well, to get the excel data into MySQL, you could export it to a .csv (comma separated value file), and then use PHP to import that into MySQL. The process for doing this is as follows:

Open the file
Use a for loop to go through each line
explode() the line into an array, because it's separated by commas, this is easy (if you've got commas in the data, you can use a tab-delimited file (the tab character is '\t' without the quotes))
Do a mysql insert statement for each line
Check your data in the database to make sure it's correct :-P

I've done this for a bunch of projects that I've had to do, and it takes 10-15 minutes to write the script and debug it (at least for me, I usually have some stupid mistakes in mine). If you've got 1000's of lines, expect the script to run for a little bit; don't kill it in the first 3 seconds if it doesn't complete: it's still working (hopefully it isn't in an infinate loop, though).

jmorin

hey that sounds awesome I'll give it a try. Thanks alot.

ab4net

i have did it once, and instead that i created a categorized catalouge, like to have a field : CATEG and feed it as example tshirt so:
when you retrive the data, select all products where categ = tshirt
and for viewing there images, or data use the dynamic link:
http://yourdomain/$categ/$fileid
dont know may be this is easier ...