Progress?

More double postings.

Feb. 18, 2010: So today I continued working on the glossary/database query, and basically, made little progress. After much thought and soul-searching we’ve decided to have two databases, one for the glossary itself and one for the category ids. The glossary database contains an id for each Term/Definition, Terms, Definitions and category ids (labeled with a number between one and twenty-six) that corresponds with a letter of the alphabet. The second database contains an id (twenty-six of them, one to twenty-six), a category for the corresponding letters and a status column which lets the view page know whether or not the letter has any Terms/Definitions associated with it.

The reason for this need of two databases is because when the page would load, the category links (letters) would display as a link for every Term/Definition. Basically, there are one hundred and three anchors, instead of twenty-six. I made an attempt to write a model function in Codeigniter that melds part of each database with an INNER JOIN SQL syntax. This way, they get “melded” using the id column in the second database and the cat_id column from the Glossary database. Hence, instead of one hundred and three links, there would be only twenty-six links. This, sadly, isn’t happening. I don’t know why. I’ve tried numerous versions, I’ve tried writing it out on paper. Nothing works. I had to stop and try and read up on SQL syntax and how Codeigniter handles it. I just want to accomplish something.

Feb. 21, 2010: So, at the end of the day on Thursday I ended up having a few errors in my program. These ranged from undefined variables to undefined classes. It frustrated me to no end. I’ve been working on this problem off and on all weekend. I decided to create two separate model functions, one that handles the Terms/Definitions and the other to handle the category links. I finally got it back to where it was printing all one hundred and three links. It just seemed to me that each of these should be handled separately because all the links were printing out because, for now, we were printing out all the Terms/Definitions. Even if we limited the display of Terms/Definitions to the categories, I figured that only a number of category links would get printed out depending on the number of Terms/Definitions that corresponded with the link. A third function would have to be created to combine the two previous functions. This is the only thing I can think of right now. I’ll talk with Stevie about this on Tuesday. I may be going about this the wrong way. We’ll see.