Is there a "rule"?

I am building a page with 10 menus, and about 10 submenus for each menu.

The easiest for me, would to create 10 access-tables, and then 10 recordsets.

What else can I do? Can I create "subtables" inside an Access-database? If yes, how?

Hi there, you can have as many recordsets as you like, but it is best to keep it to a minimum

Ian

"To start press any key", where's the any key?

10 open recordsets is more then anyone would advice. Especially if you're using Access as DB. Even with one recordset, Access can make problems with many users accessing it at the same time. With 10 recordsets for a menu... Don't do it that way!

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Is there a "rule"?

I am building a page with 10 menus, and about 10 submenus for each menu.

The easiest for me, would to create 10 access-tables, and then 10 recordsets.

What else can I do? Can I create "subtables" inside an Access-database? If yes, how?


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Viktor Farcic

TalkZone Manager

a rule ?
try using the JOIN features, good Dbase relations can reduce recordsets dramatically, you could for instance get ALL menu items in one go and using a join you can grab the submenus in the same run. But isn't this a bit drastic, 10 menus with 10 subs each, that's 100 menu entries, even when using pulldown menus it'll be a pain to navigate through.

Why don't you try creating a Fireworks menu and put the entries in a XML datafile, it saves recordsets and server activity, if you want you can also draw the data for the Fireworks menu from a Dbase.

But 10 recordsets is not what you want, besides the server lag it is also a pain manipulating a page with so many recordsets, every dynamic entry you alter results in a slow system that refreshes the page and the recordsets. You could also draw in the first 10 menu items then dynamically grab the 10 subs that need to be shown.

Another option, probably the best would be something like this:

Make a Dbase table called Menu with columns "ID", "MenuID", "MenuName", "MenuTarget".
ID = Unique
MenuID = text field containing something like, 1, 1_1, 1_2, 1_3, etc till 1_10, 2_1. etc..
MenuName = text field containing the names you want to display.
MenuTarget = text field containing the URL's where the menu's go.

Then you grab all those menu's and you have to write a little code to split the items and show them accordingly. This is probably the best method, but involves a pretty good deal of handcoding. The easiest way to do this is make the menu in a external file, like the one that fireworks creates then alter this file to grab the data, split it in variables, write out the menu items and have the page check to see if it has sub items then it has to write those before. Hmmm, i will try this for my big support site and if it works i will show you how to do this.
Maybe someone could write a behavior for this, because that would be SOO cool !

With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services

Hi everybody

A lot of answers hehe <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_shock.gif border=0 align=middle>

Dennis--&gt;No Fireworks <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
Well, maybe I don't have 10x10 menus exactly. See for yourself demenskonsulent.dk/new/test.html

What I basically need to go in an access-table is:

1) Main menus
2) Submenus (with title so I can update them via cms)
3) "content" (when selected a submenu)

I think my problem is, that I do not know how to structure my database after those needs - can you help me with that?

That's not so hard, you just need to set it up so that a referential integrity exists between the main menu's and sub menu's. I'll give you something to start with.
I made the relations like this:
dennisvg.homeip.net/FIS/Elkjaer_menu.gif
As you can see the sub items would redirect to a article.asp page with a parameter like ?subMenuID=15
15 in this case would bring up: sub item 3 of main item 3. Your CMS pages should use the same principle, edit a main menu item and on the mainMenuedit.asp page we would have options to alter the submenus and the related articles, for complete ease I stuffed the content in the submenu table.
You can examine it further by downloading this file djvgalen.tripod.com/Elkjaer.zip


With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services

Wow - thanks Dennis.

That was genereous of you.
It looks kind of advanced <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle> - I did'nt know access could do that.

Thanks again, Peter