--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --------------------------------- In my opinion: The easiest thing for you to do right now would be a table like ID (primary key) NAME PARENTID You don't need PARENT, because you have the PARENTID, you can always retrieve parent. Although... i still think it would have been simpler to do separate tables for each taxonomic level, and this single table design may cause problems down the road if you start adding more fields... but anyway. Keep it simple. One ID is all you need to identify any row. As far as the URL, you could use the scheme i gave earlier for the URLs (if you can absolutely guarantee 100% every NAME-PARENT combination will be unique), but it would be more complicated PHP code and more complicated queries, and links would break when spellings changed. Just use the ID in the URL, it's simple. If you add or delete rows, or change spelling, the keys stay the same, primary keys don't change. Just make sure you don't delete anything's parent and everything will be just fine.
* * * * * OK, thanks. I'll give that a try. I'll probably try to combine it with the recursive array described at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/hierarchical-data-database/3 (after I learn how to do it). Let me throw one more curve ball at you, though. I now understand that I can't combine my primary key with the field Name, like 8leo. But do you know if I could combine numerals from this "tree traversal" script with Name? Here's why numerals appeal to me. If I combine fields like Name/Parent ID - e.g. leo/Pan, then it will be more difficult when I want to separate them. If I combine Name with a numeral - e.g. leo/8 - then all I need is a script that weeds out all numerals. I think. Does this make sense? Thanks. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]