How to build unlimited level of menu through PHP and mysql

Question

Well, to build my menu my menu I use a db similar structure like this

  2  Services                  0
  3  Photo Gallery             0
  4  Home                      0
  5  Feedback                  0
  6  FAQs                      0
  7  News & Events             0
  8  Testimonials              0
 81  FACN                      0
 83  Organisation Structure   81
 84  Constitution             81
 85  Council                  81
 86  IFAWPCA                  81
 87  Services                 81
 88  Publications             81

To assign another submenu for existing submenu I simply assign its parent's id as its value of parent field. parent 0 means top menu

now there is not problem while creating submenu inside another submenu

now this is way I fetch the submenu for the top menu

<ul class="topmenu">
    <? $list = $obj -> childmenu($parentid); 
        //this list contains the array of submenu under $parendid
        foreach($list as $menu) {
            extract($menu);
            echo '<li><a href="#">'.$name.'</a></li>';
        }
    ?>
</ul>

What I want to do is.

I want to check if a new menu has other child menu

and I want to keep on checking until it searches every child menu that is available

and I want to display its child menu inside its particular list item like this

<ul>       
       <li><a href="#">Home</a>
        <ul class="submenu">
           ........ <!-- Its sub menu -->
           </ul>
       </li>
</ul>

Answer 1

With a database structure like yours, it is possible to build the whole HTML menu with a single query and without recursion.

Yes - I will repeat:

• ONE QUERY
• NO RECURSION

This is the approach I always use myself.

Pasted the code here - fully functional:

http://pastebin.com/GAFvSew4

Jump to line 67 to see the interesting part ("get_menu_html").

The main loop starts at line 85.

There are five "customizable" HTML snippets:

1. menu wrapper opening (line 83)
2. menu wrapper closing (line 122)
3. menu item with childs opening (line 100)
4. menu item with childs closing (line 92)
5. menu item without childs (line 113)

(The code could be cleaner if I hadn't worried with tabulation.)

SQL to create and populate sample database is available at the end of the script.

You can try and let us know your thoughts.