Re: Recursive Select Box

Matt Palermo wrote:

Hey everyone. I'm looking for assistance/suggestions/answers on how to build a select dropdown box from data that needs to be pulled recursively from a MySQL database. Basically the situation is mainly for a dicussion thread system type of thing where I have categories nested inside categories, nested inside categories... Anyway, I want to be able to build a drop down box containing all the categories indented underneath it's parent category to look something similar to this: ------------------------- Top Level Category

     - Nested Category
          - Lower level
               - Etc....

Top Level Category

     - Nested Category

Top Level Category ------------------------- Then the user will be able to select one from the dropdown menu. I have all the categories stored in a MySQL database called site_categories. The table is setup like this: __________________________________

| Cat_ID | Cat_Parent |       Cat_Name         |

|---------------------------------------------|

|    1       |         0         |       Top Level  1      |

|---------------------------------------------|

|    2       |         1         |       Nested 1            |

|---------------------------------------------|

|    3       |         0         |       Top Level   2     |

|---------------------------------------------|

|    4       |         2         |       Nested 2            |

|---------------------------------------------| Sorry for the bad pictures you hopefully you get the idea. Anything with a 0 Cat_Parent is a Top Level category. Then the others are all nested inside other categories that have the same Cat_ID as the nested categories Cat_Parent. I basically need help creating a properly indented dropdown menu box using this structure from the database. I assume I'm gonna have to use some sort of recursion here, but I'm not sure how to go about this. Please help if you can. Thanks, Matt http://sweetphp.com

I'd suggest using a recursive function. (I'm assuming you're using PEAR DB...) function getSelect(&$db, $catParent = 0, $indent = '') { $sth = $db->query('SELECT * FROM categories WHERE Cat_Parent = '.$catParent); while($rec = $sth->fetchRow()) {

    echo '<option value="'.$rec['Cat_ID'].'">'.$indent.$rec['Cat_Name'].'</option>';
    getSelect($db, $rec['Cat_ID'], $indent.'  ');

} } $db = DB::connect('mysql://user:pass@host/db'); $db->setFetchMode(DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC); echo '<select name="selectBox">'; getSelect($db); echo '</select>'; I think that will work ;-) -- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>