Okay, what do you say to this.

This company sells vitamins, and they don't want to just do a search, they want a user to be able to actually browse by company or category. I know using the Script to achieve this is very complicated, so I won't try this (unless you know of an easy way), but I am ready to do this manually. Here is the problem. They have 1500 products, 75 companies, 10 categories, and 30 sub-categories (don't ask). Here is the plan, I already mentioned this to you, but here it is again.

When a user clicks on Browse by Category, they will get to all the categories available (i.e. Stereo Systems, VCR's, TV's, Walkman's) When the user clicks on one of the categories i.e. Stereo Systems, they will get to all the sub-categories for This category, i.e. Boom Boxes, Home Theaters, Car Stereos. Once they click on one of the sub-categories they will get to a page with all the companies that have this sub-category. They choose a company they would like to see, and it takes them to the actual database search results opposed to the previous pages which were HTML.

I know this sounds extremely painful (It sure does for me). Like I said, I understand the script probably can't do this, but I need the script to make me the list for all the categories that belong to each company.

What I was going to do is, do a search for a company i.e. Sony, and see all the categories it has and write it down, then I would see al the sub-categories it has and write that down. I would continue on doing this for all 75 companies. My eyes will be fried by the time I finish. I need a solution to list all categories and sub-categories, and next to it list all the companies that have them.

JPDeni, please please tell me you have a solution for me. If you don't have one I understand, it is a pretty big task I want to do.

Thank You
JFrost

I'm just trying to figure out why a company that sells vitamins would be listing products like Stereo Systems and Walkmans!

This would be a really major undertaking and would probably require multiple, interconnected db files -- a relational database. It probably could be done, but it would require many hours of custom scripting. You could probably do it quite easily in MSAccess, but not in DBMan.


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JPD

 
I've been mulling something like this over meself, and I reckon it would be a hell of a lot easier (while still bloody messy) to do something like this with Links as against dbMan. Since the relational databases are already built into Links (the actual links database and the categories database are basically just two dbMan installations), it might be easier to do it that way, modifying the fields and the way they're delivered to the final pages.

And of course you would have the added advantage of being able to build "proper" HTML pages instead of generated cgi pages, so the search engines will spider the site too. I was thinking of doing something like this for a "Yellow Pages" type site sometime in the future.

But this of course is all speculative, it would be a hefty project to do, and you would need to be comfortable with both Links and dbMan to do it. But one of the pros might be willing to do it for you for a fee.

Sorry I can't be more help,
adam