product attributes problem ??

[PHPycho]

Hello forums !!
while trying to design a database for shopping cart i encountered few problems which i am mentioning here.
I had hierarchical level of categories for products for which i designed table as:

id|title|parent_id

Different products under different cateogries has different attributes ie for example products under
'Clothing' has different attributes than products under 'Music'. It means we cant have static form fields for attributes.I tried to
figure out this table for storing products attributes and values

id|category_id|attribute_name|attribute_type
id|attribute_id|attribute_value

I think this is bit tedious in retrieving and displaying the attribute name and its corrsponding form field type, and also tedious in dynamically inserting, updating etc operations
is there any effective methods for such case ??
I would really appreciate if there is alternative.
Thanks in advance for the comments and suggestions.

[paulnaj]

Hi there,

Might be able to help you but not 100% sure I understand your problem.

The thing that's confusing me is:

id|category_id|attribute_name|attribute_type
id|attribute_id|attribute_value

What are these two tables?

Can you give us some example data displayed in the sort of hierachy you're looking for?

Paul.

PS You may just be looking for a many-to-many relationship. That is, you have two tables: category, attribute where categories can have any number of attributes, but attributes can be associated with any number of categories. Is that it?