Question

I’m building a website in PHP to share my comics. I’d like to implement categorization to allow people to filter which comics they’d like to see.

I’ve asked this question before, but at that time my site’s architecture was not using a database.I’ve since implemented a database (which is amazing, btw) so I need to change things up.

I’m thinking the way to do this is:

1) Make 2 tables: 1 for categories, 1 for images

2) Insert images into their respective tables based on which filesystem folder they’re in and assign that table id

3) Insert all images into All_Images table with their newly assigned category id

4) Take in user input to decide which images to show. So, if user input = cat 1, then show images with category 1 id.

So, basically I need a way to initially assign categories to the images when they come in from the filesystem. Is there an easier way to do this? Do I have to create multiple tables?

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

The normal way would be to have an images table (presumably with filenames rather than the actual images?) and then a one-to-many relationship to categories so that each comic can have more than one:

Table:Image
-----------
rowid: integer identity
displayname: varchar
filename: varchar

Table:Category
--------------
rowid: integer identity
displayname: varchar

Table:ImageCategoryLink
-----------------------
imageid: integer foreign key references Image:rowid
categoryid: integer foreign key references Category:rowid

Clear?