Product Categories

Hey Jason

Just looking for your opinion as to the best way to allow a client to add/edit product categories - my thinking is to just create an insert/update set of pages just for the category options? Is there a more elegant/efficient way to achieve this?

Thanks

Jamie

depends on how you want categories to work.


You may create a many to one relation of products to categories or a many to many relation of products to categories.

which you chose will determine the way to implement categories.

sorry to be thick but for clarification, when you say many to one vs many to many do you mean

many products to one categeory vs products being able to be associated with all/many of the categories?

one category for each product

- store selected category ID in products table

versus products belonging to multiple categories

- use a productcategories linking table, this is similar to the genres example in the Manage relational table tutorial.

When you say one category for each product, I am assuming you mean that although there may be multiple categories, each product would only be a member of one category?

Basically, if I am setting up a grocery shop with, let's say, categories of cheese, meat, beer...then you would have multiple products within each cat? Such as in cheese cat you could have product of cheddar, Camembert, Brie etc etc?

That being the case... Should I set up a category insert/update page for the client to be able to add/edit or remove categories and then create a dynamic list of each category which then populates with the product associated with it?

  When you say one category for each product, I am assuming you mean that although there may be multiple categories, each product would only be a member of one category?  

yes, that is what i mean.

if you are doing it this way, a product can onlt belong to one category, the create the category add / update pages

then on the product page, add a select list to select the associated category.

populate it from the category table using the category ID as the value.

in the product Insert / update behavior, bind the category column of the products table to the select list.

thanks for the clarification and pointer... got that all working.

what I havent managed to get working is that when in the update page, the category that is showing as the selected one is always the top category rather than the one that was selected.

<select name="ProductCategory">
                <?php do { ?>
                <option value="<?php echo $row_Categories['CategoryID']; ?>" ><?php echo $row_Categories['CategoryName']; ?></option>
                <?php } while ($row_Categories = mysql_fetch_assoc($Categories)); ?>
              </select>

Have attached the file if if helps...

Cheers

in design view, select the category list.

in the property inpsector, click the dynmaic button.

click the lightning bolt next to the Select Value Equal to and select the category column from the products recordset.

thanks JAson but that hasnt made any difference at all... the drop down is still showing the topmost item as the default

edit sorry just to clarify, I have tried using both the category recordset and the product recordset to do this without any success and this is the code I currently have:

<select name="ProductCategory">
                  <option value="<?php echo $row_Categories['CategoryID']; ?>" <?php if (!(strcmp($row_Categories['CategoryName']))) {echo "selected=\"selected\"";} ?>><?php echo $row_Categories['CategoryName']; ?></option>
                
              </select>

and this is giving me 'wrong parameter count for strcomp ().....

you used the category name column from the categories recordset.

use the category column from the products recordset.