New Project, Thoughts Appreciated

[Geee]

Hi all.
I have a new project to tackle, and I would greatly appreciate your thoughts and input into how I'm tackling it. Here is an outline:

The project is a specific online catalogue for a technology reseller. Basically, they want to be able to catagorise their products. They want to have a number of categories for some products, but only one for others. For instance, to find a CISCO 1760 switch, you will have to drill down through NETWORKS --> SWITCHES --> CISCO --> 1000 SERIES --> 1760. But to find Microsoft Windows 2000 ME you will only need to drill down through SOFTWARE --> MICROSOFT --> WINDOWS ME.

The structure of the database as I see it is CategoryID(PK), CAtegoryName, Parent. Where Parent is the categoryID of the category 1 level obove itself. Parent is 0 if this category is at the root.

Has anyone tackled a project like this? Or do you have any thoughts that I haven't thought about?

G -GTM Solutions, Home of USITE-
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http://www.gtmsolutions.com=-

 

[donniea21]

Hard to get a good idea of what kind of design your thinking of..if your refering to how you can design a search like page to drill down, you could use dynamic dropdowns...ie. user chooses Networks from a dropdown, then a new dropdown is available to choose swiches etc..Once the exact product is listed you can bring the info about the product by using a SQL statement..

 

[vasah20]

We implemented a drill down just like yours, and the table layout you're thinking about will work fine. We implemented it, and it served us really well for our categories and subcategories.

hth
leo