Question

I’m trying to build a breadcrumb here and I’m having some trouble doing it. The problem arises from the fact that I have to save category name (in two languages), slug and id.

My categories table looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `categories` (
 `category_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `category_name` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
 `category_slug` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
 `category_parent` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
 `category_description_ro` text CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
 `category_description_en` text CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`category_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=8 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

Bellow is an example of data in the table:

category id | category name | category_parent

1            Categoria 1            0        
2            Categoria 2            0        
3            Categoria 3            0        
4            Categoria 1.1          1        
5            Categoria 1.2          1        
6            Categoria 1.3          1        
7            Categoria 1.1.2        4 

I have to mention that I can not make any change to the MySQL table.

What I would like to accomplish is to build a breadcrumb like:

Home > Categoria 1 > Categoria 1.1 >
Categoria 1.1.2

Can anyone provide a small piece of code on how to do this?
I already tried that “the path to a node” code from here, but, as I said, I have to include in that array category_name, category_slug, category_description_ro and category_description_en.
Thanks in advance guys.

Answer 1

In pseudo-code:

$currentID = 7;
do{
    $category = getCategoryByID($currentID);
    $currentID = $category['category_parent'];

    $crumb .= $category['category_name'];
}while($category['category_parent']);

This will just loop back up the category tree, building the crumb until there are no more parents.