Re: Tree structures...

Joe Celko wrote a book called "SQL for Smarties" that has about 20 pages devoted to representation of trees in SQL. I believe he also has a website. His quick take on representing trees in SQL is that hierarchical databases do this far better and a RECURSIVE UNION funtion is needed to do this in SQL. Which we don't have -- maybe SLQ3? But, cribbing freely from his book, try this ... Lets call the table "things" select D1.Description, "Descrip", P2.parent from things as D1, things as P1, things as P2 where D1.Parent = P1.ID and P1.Parent = P2.ID I don't see how this handles the null values, but I hope it can get you started. I'll cheerfully hand this on to persons more expert in SQL than myself. HOw you display it, once you have the values fetched is another exercise. The book is worth getting. ISBN 1-55860-323-9 Regards - Miles Thompson At 11:27 PM 3/24/01 +1200, you wrote:

What's the best way to deal with tree structures? Use the following setup in a database as an example: ID | Parent | Description ------------------------

1 |        |   Colours
2 |    1   |  Red
3 |        |   Hello
4 |    1   |  Green
5 |     4  |  Light
6 |     4  |  Dark

This should be represented as: 1. Colours 4. +--Green

6.       +--Dark
5.       +--Light

2. +--Red 3. Hello (ie, in tree structure and ordered alphabetically by 'descriptiu What's the best way to select the data and render it in HTML? I thought about going thru each element (of the whole table) at a time, and making an array, dynamically adding bits of the tree together until the whole tree has been grown ... but it seems a little bit complicated and slow ... is there anything that could be done [database]server-side which might help me? Or do other people have code snippets, ideas or anything which might help me?? Thanks, Siggy -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-db-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-db-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net