Question

I have the following tables category and category_description in php mysql. my question is how with the information below do i go about creating an unlimited amount of subcategories in a ul li structure. I have looked at various examples on here but no no avail many thanks for your time in reading this question. i look forward to your response

Column         Type         Null    Default
category_id    int(11)      No       
image          varchar(255) Yes     NULL     
parent_id      int(11)      No      0    
top            tinyint(1)   No       
column         int(3)       No       
sort_order     int(3)       No      0    
status         tinyint(1)   No       
date_added     datetime     No      0000-00-00 00:00:00      
date_modified  datetime     No      0000-00-00 00:00:00      

And the descriptions are stored in this table

Column            Type          Null
category_id       int(11)       No       
language_id       int(11)       No       
name              varchar(255)  No       
description       text          No       
meta_description  varchar(255)  No       
meta_keyword      varchar(255)  No       

Answer 1

opencart has the

$this->model_catalog_category->getCategory()

method, and you pass the category id as a parameter, such as

$category = this->model_catalog_category->getCategory(5);

That also handles the appropriate description join too so you don’t need to access them directly. As @Till Helge Helwig has already pointed out, you need to use a recursive function if you want to build a tree of these with all the subcategories. A good place to see an example of this is in the actual category module code. Scroll to the bottom of the file catalog/controller/module/category.php and you will see a recursive function that builds the html for it