Question

I want to store website page hierarchy in a table.

What I would like to achieve is efficiently
1) resolve (last valid) item by path (e.g. “/blogs/programming/tags/asp.net,sql-server”, “/blogs/programming/hello-world” )
2) get ancestor items for breadcrump
3) edit an item without updating the whole tree of children, grand children etc.

Because of the 3rd point I thought the table could be like

ITEM
id    type        slug           title               parentId
1     area        blogs          Blogs
2     blog        programming    Programming blog    1
3     tagsearch   tags                               2
4     post        hello-world    Hello World!        2

Could I use Sql Server’s hierarchyid type somehow (especially point 1, “/blogs/programming/tags” is the last valid item)?
Tree depth would usually be around 3-4.

What would be the best way to achieve all this?

Answer 1

The way you have done this seems fine, you can make use of CTE recursive functions to create the hierarchy for you

Something like

DECLARE @ITEM  TABLE(
        id INT,
        type VARCHAR(20),
        slug VARCHAR(50),
        title VARCHAR(50),
        parentId  INT
)

INSERT INTO @ITEM SELECT 1,'area','blogs','Blogs', NULL
INSERT INTO @ITEM SELECT 2,'blog','programming','Programming blog',1 
INSERT INTO @ITEM SELECT 3,'tagsearch','tags',',',2 
INSERT INTO @ITEM SELECT 4,'post','hello-world','Hello World!',2 

;WITH Items AS (
        SELECT  *,
                CAST('/' + slug + '/' AS VARCHAR(50)) PathVal
        FROM    @ITEM
        WHERE   parentId IS NULL
        UNION ALL
        SELECT  i.*,
                CAST(Items.PathVal + i.slug + '/' AS VARCHAR(50))
        FROM    Items INNER JOIN
                @ITEM i ON i.parentId = Items.ID
)

SELECT  *
FROM    Items