Greetings to all,
I was subscribed a couple years ago to this group and got busy with
other priorities until recently. Since then, I have learned more PHP,
at least to the point that I do get things to work at times but not a
proficient coder yet.
In another strong interest and endeavor, I have spent about 7 years
researching (via books, Internet, etc.) and recording as many woods
and woody plants of the world as I can. I started with a text file
and this has grown to a massive 5.8 meg. plus in size (over 151,000
lines!). My research will not stop so, with such a huge knowledge
base, the longer I wait for a conversion over to a database driven
receptacle for
all this data, the more horrendous will be the job of hand bombing
all that data into the new PHP/MySQL application. There is, therefore,
a certain urgency to finally build this knowledge base repository.
For ease of conversation, I nicknamed the file my TAXA (short for
"Taxonomy") and thereby the name also for the research project.
There are 4 levels of organization with each level in a one to many
set of relationship --- like a large upside down tree structure. The
names of these levels are the same as used in scientific naming of
living things, namely order, family, genus and species. Anyone
who has taken any biology or botany will probably quickly relate to
this. Eventually, I wish to be able to travel up and down this data
tree and be able to display recorded information for each element
stored. For now, I will be content to be able to travel from highest
level (ie. order) all the way down to showing details of individual species.
I had a number of months where priorities took me away from all this
but I am back in earnest determined to get this done.
At each level, one element has its information displayed with all
relevant subservient elements listed below so you can click on one and
proceed down to the next level and show the details on that element
(and on and on right down to the species level that has the most
details for any level -- even photos of what that wood looks like
when available). As we drop down from Order to Species, the number of
elements grows exponentially:
Woody Orders - about 95 --------> Woody Families
Woody Families - about 435 -------> Woody Genera (singular: "Genus" )
Woody Genera - over 3,300 --------> Woody Species
Woody Species - 10,000 and more.
Even at the top Orders level, it makes sense to have the data show in
columns and pretty much mandatory any place below this. In my
prior efforts before I had to break off for a spell (... months ago),
I actually was able to write code that would count the number of elements
in a table and make columns of proper length. I wasn't quite be
successful in populating data properly in those columns from table
---- close but no bananas (or --- err --- should that be woods).
If you got this far reading, much thanks. I know this may seem a bit
long winded but at least you will know just where I am coming from.
With that behind, now I can ask some questions that might help:
1 - Does anyone have code that can read names from a MySQL
table and present it in columns?
2 - Each element displayed is not just static text. Clicking
on one would look up data on it and display it (numerous fields).
3 - Then the format as in #1 displays the elements
subservient below that --- all the way from order to finally full details of a
wood at species level.
Any code suggestions? This all needs to be dynamically reading data
from MySQL tables, displaying it and then letting a user choose
from a list an element in the next lower level (except species ---
end of the line). I am reasonably convinced that the code can be similar
at the different levels and can be largely modularized and semi
repeatable at each level.
Hope I didn't scare everyone away with such a long introduction ;-) .
I look forward to seeing what you have to say.
With thanks in advance,
Bill Mudry
Mississauga, Ontario Canada
