All, I am presently accomplishing this problem in code but was wondering if I can have MySQL do the heavy lifting instead and get the advantage of sorting and whatnot.
I have basically the following layout in my document tracking system to define various categories and then populate them with entries: To define the various sections I have the following table (simplified for discussion): -[ SectionTypes Table ]- SectionID SectionDescription To define the column(s) belonging to the section; I have a table like below: (A given section can 1+ columns, realistically never more than 10-15 columns though) -[ SectionColumnTypes Table ]- SColumnID SectionID ColumnTitle I then use two tables to track the data: First table represents a single entry under a given Section, no real details just a linkup -[ Documents Table ]- DocID SectionID Second table represents the column entries -[ DocumentColumns Table ]- DColumnsID DocID SColumnID Value In code I am pulling this into a grid with a given row being: DocID | Value.1 | Value.N... For a given SectionType I would like to determine the number of columns (based on the SectionColumnTypes table) and then populate rows for each Documents table entry with the DocumentColumns values pulled into columns (as shown above). Is this possible? Should I re-think my database layout to make it possible? Should I just do it in code? Thanks for any assistance and sorry for the long message; I can't think of a more succinct way to describe the issue. -Geoff
