two dynamic menus

After having setup the design part of CSS Menu Writer I ask myself how I would manage a 2 level dynamic category menu.
Which model would you suggest?
I usually have a database table structure like shown in screenshot177.jpg
It works with a combination of categories_id and parent_id
If parent_id = 0 it is the main category
if the parent_id <> 0 it shows to which main category (categories_id) it belongs.

Is there a way to fill this into dynamic menus or would you suggest another structure?

Any hint most welcome!

but it does not work for me because the first menu needs
1) a sorter
2) parent_id = 0

can you please lead me in the right direction?

I figured out the menu.php file in the cssmw subdirectory and entered all necessary code there. It works but with each little change it resets the file to its unsufficient defaults!

How can one get the Filter in the "Filter and sort (optional)" menu working if you need 2 or more criteria?
I need a languageID ("1" for English, "2" for Spanish ...) AND a value for the Main Menu: (parent_id = 0)
The nesting is working but again falls short for the language option.

How would you suggest to solve this?

I think you will need to add some custom code to the menu.php to get the other filtering working. In your menu.php, you should have two record sets, open the second record sets which you already probably modified to get the sub categories working, and then add another custom filter to it, so your final query would probably look something like this:

SELECT categories_name, categories_id, languageID, sort_order FROM menu WHERE categories_id=%s AND languageID = 1 ORDER BY sort_order ASC

Let me know if you have any other questions.

actually I had to fiddle a bit more because the langauge id is not static but will also receive its value by $_GET[]:

mysql_select_db($database_mydatabase, $mydatabase);
$query_menuwriter_categories1 = sprintf("SELECT language_id, categories_id,
categories_name, parent_id, sorter FROM categories WHERE parent_id=%s
AND language_id=%s ORDER BY sorter ASC",
GetSQLValueString($MenuWriter_menuwriter_categories1, "int"),
GetSQLValueString($language_menuwriter_categories1, "int"));
$menuwriter_categories1 = mysql_query($query_menuwriter_categories1, $mydatabase) or die(mysql_error());
$row_menuwriter_categories1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($menuwriter_categories1);
$totalRows_menuwriter_categories1 = mysql_num_rows($menuwriter_categories1);

I'd like to suggest to update CssMW in order to be able to do this from the menu...

Don't know why there is a space in the code further up at "$query_menuwriter_categories1"

Thanks for responding back, since it will help other uses who are trying to achieve the same result. I will bring this issue to our engineers and see if it is something we can add to Menu Writer.

Thanks.