Comment System

Anon

Hey guys,

Okay, I have a few ideas, but not too sure if they'll work, and before I dive into anything I want to ask for some of your help.

What I want to do is create a comment, but I want the ability to reply to messages, etc, somewhat similar to a message board. Yeah okay, I got all of that down, but what I'm a bit confused with is, is how to 'indent' the replies, similar to how phorum does theirs in thread mode, but without the images.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
John Barker

Anon

Generally speaking, threading is evil. Nevertheless, I'll tell you how to do it.

Store the comments in a table. Each comment should have a unique ID. One of the fields should be the ID of a parent.

Any comment with a null parent is a root-level comment. Any comment with a parent, obviously, is a followup or child.

To display:

Write a function getlinks($parentid). If $parentid is not zero, increment a global indentation counter. Select for all comments where parentid=$parentid. For each returned object, loop from 0 to the indentation counter value, printing out an indentation character (a nonbreaking space will do). Then print out the link to the current item and call getlinks() with the current item's unique ID as an argument. At the end of the function, decrement the indentation counter and return.

What you've just done is created a recursive function.

Call it with an argument of zero: getlinks(0) and it will begin with all the root-level comments. It will follow each item's chain and print out a complete tree-structured set of links.

Anon

Hmmm I somewhat get what you're saying, can you please give me an example?

Thanks 🙂
John Barker

Steve Yelvington wrote:

Generally speaking, threading is evil. Nevertheless, I'll tell you how to do it.

Store the comments in a table. Each comment should have a unique ID. One of the fields should be the ID of a parent.

Any comment with a null parent is a root-level comment. Any comment with a parent, obviously, is a followup or child.

To display:

What you've just done is created a recursive function.

Call it with an argument of zero: getlinks(0) and it will begin with all the root-level comments. It will follow e....

Anon

I used to have a function that did exactly what I just described, but I threw it out when I decided to go with a flatter discussion model supported by potentially nested folders.

But you might find the following useful. It is a recursive function that assembles (does not print out, but builds) a string that serves as a bread crumb trail. It basically does the reverse of what I described, starting at the leaf and backing up to the root.

You call it like so:

echo breadcrumbs($location);

... where $location would be the unique ID of the current context (discussion that is being displayed). See this at the top of the pages at http://stonemountain.yi.org/.

In this example a "room" can be a discussion (a collection of notes arranged in a linear fashion) or a folder (a collection of discussions and/or folders).

function breadcrumbs($id)
{
global $roomid; // where we are
global $db; // db handle
global $prattle_rooms; // table name
global $breadcrumbtrail;

    $result = mysql_db_query($db, "select * from $prattle_rooms where

roomid='$id'");

    $room = mysql_fetch_object($result);

// if we are examining the CURRENT room, we
// don't print out a link, just the room name.

   if ($id == $roomid)
            $breadcrumbtrail = $room->title;

// otherwise, we want the room name to
// be clickable to "back up" to a higher level

    else
            $breadcrumbtrail = "<a href=\"prattle.php?roomid=$room->roomid\">$room->title</a> > $breadcrumbtrail";

// if we are not at the top level, look up and
// recurse ...

    if ($room->roomparent) breadcrumbs($room->roomparent);

// return a printable string

    return $breadcrumbtrail;
    }