Tag: adjacency list model
A recursive method to storing hierarchical data without multiple calls to the database
by Henry Weismann on Feb.22, 2011, under Web Development
So here goes my first code snippet post. I recently needed to create a hierarchical list of categories. Since I am no genius and I don’t want to recreate the wheel I looked at all the methods I could find in a google search. This brought me to Evolt.org which mentioned:
- Recursion
- Stack
- Flat Table
- Modified Preorder Tree Traversal Algorithm
Then I found an article on sitepoint.om which got me stoked cause sitepoint always has the best articles. All these articles and numerous other results left me wanting to use the data structure I see most apps using with a parent_id and recursion but all the examples, even on sitepoint, used a database call inside the recursive function which I thought was a really big no no. I couldn’t believe all these sites were discarding recursion as too much overhead because of the database call when they just needed to rework it a bit to get rid of that overhead.
So here is the recursive method, named the adjacency list model by sitepoint, to storing hierarchical data without multiple calls to the database.
(continue reading…)