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There's one more thing I forgot to mention... The data I'm having the user order is not only order-specific, but is recursive. That is, one of the items on th

There's one more thing I forgot to mention... The data I'm having the user order is not only order-specific, but is recursive. That is, one of the items on the list, rather than be a letter like "B" can be a list in and of itself. It's basically like "files and folders" A major problem isn't only the UI, which took me days to make (drag and drop for files/folders ... anybody seen anything like this done before in HTML+JS?), but mostly is in the updating/validation. I receive information, like "moved item: /path/to/item to before /some/other/path" and I now need to make sure this is a valid action (eg: can't put a folder into one of its own subfolders, can't put a file in a file, etc), and also update the database to reflect this. I chose to use JSON to encode objects in the DB, then decode them into an array, and do some easy/fast array stuff to perform the action they requested. Just judging on the array code, which does several "isset()" calls and splices, I'd imagine doing this with a DB would be a major heartache... but I have no doubt you'd be able to come up with some brilliant way to do it. To each their own :)

jsrn 18y ago
> To each their own :) yeah, of course! And if it works, then, by definition, it's good for your customers and thus for you! Also, your approach is probably more flexible (no fixed schema for the recursive list structure), which makes it easier and faster for you to iterate and react to customer feedback. If at some time you want to have a more fixed structure or let the database do some of the server-side validation work of your tree-like structure, here is a good writeup by Phil Greenspun showing how to model and query tree-like datastructures with an RDBMS: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html (the rest of the document 'SQL for Web Nerds' is also quite good stuff: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql http://philip.greenspun.com/sql ) he uses 'connect by', which is a non-standard Oracle extension, the same thing can be achieved with 'with recursive'-queries, which is standard SQL (1999) and part of PostgreSQL 8.4 Also, Joe Celko's Book 'SQL for Smarties' has a good chapter covering hierarchical data structures in SQL (he also has a separate book about 'trees and hierarchies' in SQL). Oh, and good luck and much success with your startup!
drewp 18y ago
A tree widget with DD? http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/reorder.html http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/reorder.html I bet there are lots of others too. This doesn't sound like something you'd ever want to write yourself (unless the widget IS your project).

jsrn 18y ago

> To each their own :) yeah, of course! And if it works, then, by definition, it's good for your customers and thus for you! Also, your approach is probably more flexible (no fixed schema for the recursive list structure), which makes it easier and faster for you to iterate and react to customer feedback. If at some time you want to have a more fixed structure or let the database do some of the server-side validation work of your tree-like structure, here is a good writeup by Phil Greenspun showing how to model and query tree-like datastructures with an RDBMS: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html (the rest of the document 'SQL for Web Nerds' is also quite good stuff: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql http://philip.greenspun.com/sql ) he uses 'connect by', which is a non-standard Oracle extension, the same thing can be achieved with 'with recursive'-queries, which is standard SQL (1999) and part of PostgreSQL 8.4 Also, Joe Celko's Book 'SQL for Smarties' has a good chapter covering hierarchical data structures in SQL (he also has a separate book about 'trees and hierarchies' in SQL). Oh, and good luck and much success with your startup!

drewp 18y ago

A tree widget with DD? http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/reorder.html http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/reorder.html I bet there are lots of others too. This doesn't sound like something you'd ever want to write yourself (unless the widget IS your project).