Virtual Folders/Paths

fubowl

Hi,

I'm sure you've seen this question before and I've found some generic answers via the Search, but none that satisfies my query. I would like to know if anyone can either redirect me to an article or can help me directly with this.

I'd like to be able to have a system with any arbitray/unlimited amount of sub-folders in the url (http://mysite.com/about/team/joe/my-dogs) and have that resolved to a specific entry (joes-dogs) in the DB. But of course I could have (http://mysite.com/about/team/franny/my-dogs) with the same end "folder" but it would have to differentiate because of the preceeding folders.

Also, to my understand, using mod_rewrite, which I've seen many times used as an example, you have to layout your variables in your .htaccess to be passed to the script. I'm looking for an unlimited number of "folders", thus an unlimited amount of variables would need to be present.

The only method I'm familiar with is recursion down a tree but I know that to be quite inefficient. I'd just like to be able to process down the URL path and find that exact entry as efficiently as possible without sacrificing too many queries, since it would be happening on every page load.

I'd like any examples or a point in the right direction. I'd really appreciate your help and thank you in advance.

sneakyimp

i'm guessing here, but i don't think you can set up an .HTACCESS file to recurse anything. it would expect a fixed number of variables. I know almost nothing about how to write a url rewriting access file.

in the event you want literally an 'arbitrary' number of folders, it would seem likely to me that you would need to set up an .htaccess mod rewrite that directs all the gazillion path possibilities to a single script and have it parse the path for you. Another thing to consider is that your domain is not part of this parsing scheme. i'm also guessing that 'about' and 'team' are also not really part of this parsing scheme. in other words, igonore those parts of the url when finding out which db entry to get.

Assuming you manage to redirect http://mysite.com/about/team/tom/dick/harry/moe/curly/larry to a script called script.php, then you might be able to do something like this:

<?
// IMPORTANT - i'm assuming your on *nix here...use \ for windows
$url_parts = explode('/', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_URL']);
$clean_parts = array();
foreach($url_parts as $part) {
  if (!empty($part) && ($part != 'team') && ($part!= 'about')) {
    $clean_parts[] = $part;
  }
}
$db_key = implode('-', $clean_parts);
echo($db_key);
?>

fubowl

Thank you for your help,

I was getting a blank array, so I replaced

$_SERVER['SCRIPT_URL']

with

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']

which received the variables. But I still have the question of going about efficiently querying the database with this information. Effectively traversing to the correct entry.

sneakyimp

do you have a database structure in mind? if so, it would be helpful to see that. at this point, i have no idea what kind of data you are storing. my code above was intended to turn some arbitrary URL into a database key. minimally, this would allow you to associate some kind of data (almost anything really) with a url.

fubowl

Thanks again for the reply,

Yes I do have something in mind. I'm inexperienced with mysql nesting/child-parent/ect. models, but the table would be setup just like a child/parent tree since I don't know a better way to go about it. I was then hoping that I could somehow be able to traverse the data using a loop or something more efficient to go down the line of URI variables.

I should have mentioned this before, but this is simply for content structuring. Of course just using 2 levels would make for a very easy parent/child structure, but I'd rather use, like I said an arbitray depth.

Efficiently querying the database is where my question really lies.

Here's any example db structure;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `test`;
CREATE TABLE `test` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `parent` varchar(55) NOT NULL default '',
  `child` varchar(55) NOT NULL default '',
  `content` text NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

sneakyimp

if what you are talking about is a tree structure, then all you need in your db table is:

id - the unique id of any data leaf or node
parent - the id if whatever node this item belongs under -- set to zero or NULL for root level items
content - might want to break this into several fields such as name, icon_image, description, etc.
url - you'll need this if you're building breadcrumbs or links and you can't readily convert your id into a url.

when you are showing an item, all you need is its id and you can fetch it's parent:
$parent_id=1234;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM tree WHERE id=$parent_id";

or its children
$this_id = 5678;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM tree WHERE parent=$this_id";

you could use $db_key from my previous code as an id if you really wanted to but you should probably limit your URLS' length if you do. another possibility would be to use a hash function like md5() to convert a url to some 32 digit number and use THAT as an id.

the whole trick now is to think more about what kind of functionality you want. do you want a tree view on the left with collapsible nodes? you'll probably need a frame and a script that builds the entire tree. flash is good for this...so is AJAX.

if you don't want a tree, you still might want breadcrumbs which display the parent objects. would there be links to these? If so, you should probably store the URL in the tree table i just described. otherwise, you need to be able to turn a database ID value into a url (which you could with my code by using explode() to separate your id at each dash and then imploding with /. problems with this approach? you can't have dashes or slashes in your directory names or you'll have consistency problems. you are also limited in your URL length. if you use a hash function to convert URLs to dbase keys, then you free yourself from URL length limitations, but you definitely need to store the URL for a given database item so that when you fetch it, you can link to it.

sounds like you need to just put some thought into what you want to come up with more specific php questions.