Question

I have a nested drag and drop list which return json formattet string. I can run php serialize, json_decode, etc. on this string. But I stuck at saving the hierarchy in DB.

Example of returned output:

[{“id”:1,”children”:[{“id”:2,”children”:[{“id”:4},{“id”:7},{“id”:8}]},{“id”:3}]},{“id”:5},{“id”:6}]

…or…

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [id] => 1
            [children] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 2
                            [children] => Array
                                (
                                    [0] => Array
                                        (
                                            [id] => 4
                                        )

                                    [1] => Array
                                        (
                                            [id] => 7
                                        )

                                    [2] => Array
                                        (
                                            [id] => 8
                                        )

                                )

                        )

                    [1] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 3
                        )

                )

        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [id] => 5
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [id] => 6
        )

)

I want to save this output to a DB-structure like this:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `menu` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `rang` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `parent_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(256) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(256) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=9 ;

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I would do it this way:

<?php
$jsonString = '[{"id":1,"children":[{"id":2,"children":[{"id":4},{"id":7},{"id":8}]},{"id":3}]},{"id":5},{"id":6}]';
$jsonArray = json_decode($jsonString, true);

function parseJsonArray($jsonArray, $parentID = 0)
{
  $return = array();
  foreach ($jsonArray as $subArray) {
     $returnSubSubArray = array();
     if (isset($subArray['children'])) {
       $returnSubSubArray = parseJsonArray($subArray['children'], $subArray['id']);
     }
     $return[] = array('id' => $subArray['id'], 'parentID' => $parentID);
     $return = array_merge($return, $returnSubSubArray);
  }

  return $return;
}

var_dump(parseJsonArray($jsonArray));

You should get array like this:

Array ( 
  [0] => Array (
    [id] => 1 
    [parentID] => 0 
  ) 
  [1] => Array (
    [id] => 2
    [parentID] => 1 
  ) 
  // ETC.
)