Question

I ran into a rather complex problem and I need the tree behavior to help.

I have a table called nodes, this table already has a tree and this tree is used to build a menu.

Now we want to make it possible to create multiple menus so I made the node_menus and menus tables. So Nodes hasAndBelongsToMany Menus

However there is a slight problem, the menus are built but uses $this->Node->find('threaded') so sub menus are possible. All nodes can be used in several menus and all menus need a tree so the nodes can be ordered and sub menus can be created as well.

For that I was thinking about creating one table containing trees for each menu and link a node to each row in the tree table.

So basically I need a trees table with a Trees belongsTo Nodes relation. In this tree i have the fields menu_id, node_id, parent_id, lft and rght.

Now the question is, are multiple trees possible in one table? Say, I want the tree where menu_id is 15. Would it be possible to use find('threaded') with said ID that would return all the data and the Nodes related to the node_id‘s. Including all of the other core functions to create and manipulate the tree.

Is this possible? If not, does anyone have a better solution on how to make multiple menus where nodes can be places in multiple menus that can be ordered and threaded?

Answer 1

Think like the following, then you can do it with a single tree.

root[hidden node]
---- Menu 1
-------- Item 1.1
-------- Item 1.2
-------- Item 1.3
---- Menu 2
-------- Sub Menu 2.1
------------ Item 2.1.1
-------- Item 2.1
---- Menu 3
---- Menu 4
---- Menu 5

I’ve made a menu builder plugins for CakePHP, you can use it if you like 🙂
https://github.com/torifat/cake-menu_builder