Question

How on earth do I make this work?

I have a database with 3 tables.

Table 1: Categories
Table 2: Organisations
Table 3: Link table with 2 colums: Category id, Organisation id.

I want to make this interface:

http://www.glowong.nl/Uploads/26-03-2012-13-46-52.jpg

When I click on ‘Opslaan/save’. The new connections should be written to Table 3.

I don’t know where to start.

Answer 1

At first glance, I would do something like so:

1) When you render the page HTML, make each Organization a named array of checkboxes where the values are the categories, like so:

<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam1[]" value="Hosting"> 
<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam1[]" value="Crediteur">
<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam1[]" value="Debiteur">
....
<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam2[]" value="Hosting"> 
<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam2[]" value="Crediteur">
<INPUT type="checkbox" name="naam2[]" value="Debiteur">

etc

2) When the form is submitted, loop through your org/categories like so:

foreach ($orgs as $org) {
    foreach ($categories as $category) {
         if (in_array($category,$_POST[$org])) {
             //the category for the given org was checked; 
             //make sure this relationship exists in the DB
         } else {
            //category for this org not checked;
            //if the relationship exists in the DB, delete it
         }
    }
}

I think something like that would work. You could have problems with this solution if you have a whloe bunch of orgs and categories since we’re doing a Cartesian-ish join in the loops, but if you have that many orgs and categories you may need to rethink your interface anyhow.