So far progress overall has been going well in general on my pet project I call the TAXA project (nickname for taxonomy). The heart of it is a botanical tree on all the woods of the world. Since viewing it can make it easier for any of you to understand and help, feel welcome to preview it at prowebcanada.com/taxa :-).
So far you can enter into this data tree at any of four levels (Order, Family, Genus or
Species). To this point of development, a person can travel down the knowledge tree but
not up. The tree represents multiple one to many relationships:
Order (top level) ---> Family ---> Genus ---> Species
All relationships are one to many.
Any of you that have had any biological training will likely be familiar with this.
Now I look forward to being able to let users travel upward in the tree.
- Each species will have one parent genus
- Each genus will have a unique parent (botanical) family
- Each family has a unique order it is under.
If I can get the SQL statement to go from one child to the parent, I know it won't be
hard to adjust it to fit the other levels. Family (child) to Order (parent) will do.
The database is called 'taxa'. I am using MySQL.
Practically all pages in the site are dynamically formed using PHP.
The engine is MYISAM. ut8_general_ci
The table for all woody orders is 'sci_order'
The index column is 'orderID'.
All orders are named in column 'order_name'
The family table is 'sci_family'
The index column is 'familyID'.
All families are named in column 'family_name'
The program that will show the parent order is showorder.php
The child family (where the link to the parent order is) is displayed by
families.php
This means that the result will be a link on the specific family page that will
make the right order data page show. Likewise, after I will design and install
such links on the other two lower levels (genus and species).
Eventually I have to encase the SQL solution in PHP statements so readers can just
click on a link to go upward bound. Having full PHP statements provided would be a
bonus but I know the heart of the solution is likely to be in the right SQL statements.
It was a close decision for me to post here or on the PHP forum :-).
As part of this .... Is a JOIN needed? I look forward to any proposed solutions.
For many of you I believe this should be easy. If anyone would wish to email me
directly, you can do so at billmudry at rogers.com.
Thank you in advance.
Bill Mudry
Mississauga, ON Canada