Question

I have a MySQL table of pages with these fields (id, parentID, name, content).

The page hierarchy is:

 - About Us 
   - History 
     - 2000
     - 2001

If I’m on page “2001” how can I create a query to find that this page’s top-level ancestor is “About Us”?

Answer 1

You can use something like the following pseudocode to do this in a recursive manner.

GetParent(current_id)
  get tuple from mysql with id = current_id
  If parentId = 0
    Return tuple (we are at top)
  Else 
    Return GetParent(parentId)