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Drilling Down data?

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:26 pm
by GeXus
How would you go about setting up something that is a tiered structure that is drilled down. let me explain.

Say you want to create a form. And based on certain elements in the form or their values, it would then drill down to the next, and so on and so forth.

So for example: If the gender is male, show xyz after submit, if xyz is blahblah show abc after submit.. and so on.

This would all have to be dynamic, so i'm just wondering how you would setup a database to do something like this. I was thinking it could use a tree traversal or something similar, but would like to here if anyone has suggestions.

Thanks!

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:33 pm
by feyd
It sounds more like you're simply setting up filters, like how you can refine your search parameters in various places.

Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 7:35 am
by Begby
There are different ways to do this and it really depends on your data.

If you have a tree structure that is user defined and you want it to go pretty deep, like maybe a nested tree of product categories that you can drill into, then tree transversal might be the way to go.

However if the branches are fixed, like you have a database of cars and want to drill down by Type->Manufacturer->Make->Model->Year, then you want to define your database and setup filters as was suggested.

There is a lot to either one of these, you are going to have to probably do javascript stuff or ajax and possibly some super complex sql queries if you use pre-order tree transversal.