Thanks to everybody who posted on this thread. I wanted to post back
the solution I came up with after removing the DB query from the
recursion. In case anyone else is trying to accomplish the same thing,
this is how I solved it (criticisms welcome, and note that I have not
tested it extensively yet):
DB structure
table: discussion_posts
post_id (auto increment, unique, primary index)
parent_id (post_id corresponding to this post's parent)
discussion_id (to allow multiple discussions, not required but I added
a discussions
member_id (to identify the post to the particular member posting the post)
table as well to store the discussion description and unique ID for
each discussion)
dt_posted (date/time the post was posted)
subject (title of the particular post)
post_text (substance of the post)
So the user selects a particular discussion from a list of
discussions. We query the database for the post_id of the first post
in the discussion requested, this post will have a parent_id of '0' or
NULL since it has no parent. We then query the DB for all the posts in
the discussion joining the members table using member_id to grab the
member's first and last name (or any other member info desired). We
order this query info by dt_posted.
We then write the contents of our second query into a two-dimensional
array ($workArr):
while ($row=@mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
foreach ($row as $key => $value) {
if ($key=="post_id") $numerKey=value;
$workArr[$key][$numerKey]=$value;
}
}
The processing of the threads into proper order looks like this:
function processthread($post_id, $workArr) {
echo "<ul class=\"posting\">";
echo "<h3>{$workArr['subject'][$post_id]} (#{$post_id})</h3>\n";
echo "<h4>by {$workArr['first_name'][$post_id]}
{$workArr['last_name'][$post_id]} "."• on " .
fixdate($workArr['dt_posted'][$post_id]) . "</h4>";
echo "<li>{$workArr['post_text'][$post_id]}</li>\n";
echo "<h5>reply to this</h5>";
// find all children, call itself on those too
foreach ($workArr['post_id'] as $value) {
if ($workArr['parent_id'][$value]==$post_id) {
processthread($workArr['post_id'][$value], $workArr);
} // end if
} // foreach
echo "</ul>";
}
And somewhere in the HTML, where appropriate, the function
processthread is called for the first time passing it the $post_id
value we determined in the first query (the very first post of the
discussion) and the $workArr array.
Use of unordered lists for design/layout is helpful here since
browsers will by default indent lists within lists and list items
within their respective list. This saves some PHP and CSS troubles if
one were to use <div> or <p> structure instead, as I found out.
Apologies for any formatting issues and vagaries about the data
structure and variable naming in this post.
- Ben
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