Interactive forum -> how to create?

[Bramvg]

Hi,

My question is about interactive forums.

It's a very 'normal' forum like this:

- Message 1
- reply 1 on message 1
- reply 2 on message 1
- reply 1 on reply 2
- reply 2 on reply 2
- reply 1 on reply 2
.....


--------------------------------------------------
My question is:

Question 1.
How do I organize my database? (Ms Access)
I thought that I needed to create 2 tables.

Table 1:
----------

ID
Category name

Table 2:
------------
ID
ID category [link with category]
Level Number [Is it a reply on a reply/....] = how is it linked with
the category
Subcategory name


Question 2.
How do code this in ColdFusion that my scripts knows how to group
it all and present it in a 'tree structure', one 'problem' is that I know
how to do it when theire is only 1 subcategory, but once I have a reply on reply
I don't know how to organize it :-(

Question 3.
How do I create my updater / insert form?


Can someone help me or does anyone knows about a reference to an article
where I can find this?

tnx and with kind regards
bram

 

[philcha]

Bramvg,

Question 1
----------
Level Number is not essential but may be handy to help you with the output page layout.
To keep track of what's a reply to what you need to define the Messages table as:
MessageNum (primary key)
CategoryCode
MessageText
ParentMessageNum (optional; if used, must = a MessageNum)
any other fields, e,g, DateFirstPosted, DateOfLastResponse, AuthorId.

This type of structure, with a relationship between 2 fields in the same table, is commonly used to represent hierarchies. But it needs to be used carefully:
* to read the table you need to write recursive code to find the replies. So I suggest 1 CF file to find the top-level messages based on category, date of last posting, etc.
and onther one, called by the first for each top-level message, which finds the level N responses and, for each one, calls itself to find the level N+1 responses, etc.
* performance will not be brilliant because you need to run so many queries to list messages.
* you'll probably want to limit the number of levels, to minimise the perfomance impact and to avoid falling off the right-hand edge of the page.

Perhaps you should consider allowing only 1 level of response message, as Tek-Tips does, i.e. you can't respond to a response, only to an original message. If you display message numbers, users can still refer to other people's responses if they wish.

The rest
--------
I suggest you look at that the wonderful Webmonkey(

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey)

- select category "Programming - ColdFusion) then type "forum" in the search box - there's an artcile there, with sample code to download (I'm reading it now). I also recommend you bookmark Webmonkey - it's full of articles on how to design various CF apps (e.g. shopping cart) and lots of other good stuff.

 

[philhege]

The forums application used by Allaire is downloadable for free. Why beat yourself up?

Search

http://forums.allaire.com/devconf

for the link; I'm sorry I don't have it handy right now.

philhege