[RESOLVED] ASP to output Nav menu with submenus from SQL

[jamesbcox1980]

Hi,

I have an augmented SQL output of:

id   url           text        title                  current    parent
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
0    /             Home        CSM Welcome Screen     true       0
1    /calls        Calls       Customer Call Input    false      1
2    /cases        Cases       Case Management        false      2
3    /rgas         RGAs        RGA Management         false      3
4    /reports      Reports     CSM Reporting          false      4
5    /admin        Admin       Administration Area    false      5
6    /calls/new    New Call    New Call Sheet         false      1
7    /calls/edit   Edit Call   Edit Call Sheet        false      1

I need to use VBScript to format this data and use it to output a Nav menu on my web page template. I have some simple script to do this from a multidimensional array, but it doesn't include the **sub-menu**.

How do I take this output from the SQL query and format it to HTML? Notice the column "current". This is a variable which is part of a statement that uses the current page id to determine whether or not a link goes to the current page. So this isn't actually pulled from SQL, but calculated during output.

So, assuming the current page id="0" (home), I need the above SQL data to be formatted into the following HTML:

<ul>
    <li><a class="current" href="/" title="CSM Welcome Screen">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/calls" title="Customer Call Input">Calls</a></li>
    <li><a href="/Cases" title="Case Management">Cases</a>
        <ul class="nav-submenu">
            <li><a href="/calls/new">New Call</a></li>
            <li><a href="/calls/edit">Edit Call</a></li>
        </ul>
    </li>
    <li><a href="/rgas" title="RGA Management">RGAs</a></li>
    <li><a href="/reports" title="CSM Reporting">Reports</a></li>
    <li><a href="/admin" title="Administration Area">Admin</a></li>
</ul>

I could probably do this 100 ways from Sunday in PHP, but I'm totally lost in VBScript ASP. Here's what I was doing when I was just using a simple array in the config file and didn't have a sub navmenu (but now I want to use SQL):

<&#37;
DIM company_name, page_title, header_nav_links(5)

company_name = "My Company"
page_title = "Customer Management System"

header_nav_links(0) = Array(0, "/", "Home", "CSM Welcome Screen", True, 0)
header_nav_links(1) = Array(1, "/calls", "Calls", "Customer Call Input", False, 1)
header_nav_links(2) = Array(2, "/cases", "Cases", "Case Management", False, 2)
header_nav_links(3) = Array(3, "/rgas", "RGAs", "RGA Management", False, 3)
header_nav_links(4) = Array(4, "/reports", "Reports", "CSM Reporting", False, 4)
header_nav_links(5) = Array(5, "/admin", "Admin", "Administration Area", False, 5)

%>
<ul>
<%
For Each i in header_nav_links
Response.write("    <li><a ")
If i(3) = 1 Then
    Response.write("class=""current"" ")
End If
Response.write("href=""" & i(0) & """ title = """ & i(2) & """>" & i(1) & "</a>")
'#### code for sub-nave menu will go here ####
Response.write("</li>" & vbCr)
Next
%>
</ul> 

I'm not so much looking for someone to program this for me, as for someone to guide me in the right direction on this for loop... I don't even know how to create a function in VBScript yet... haha Thanks!

[yamaharuss]

How do you expect your data "New Call" and "Edit Call" to be displayed as a submenu under "Cases"?? There is absolutely nothing about your data structure that ties those two subs to the "Cases" parent. If their Parent IDs were 2 instead of 1 it would make sense.

[jamesbcox1980]

Excuse me that was a mistype in the HTML, they were suppose to go under "calls". Thanks for catching that.

[jamesbcox1980]

Ok, so I figured this out after working it out in PHP first. Doing this in PHP was much easier, and I had to cheapen it to do it in VBScript with my limited knowlege. What I had to do was create a function that had an SQL query that returned the parent links, and then during the While loop to output them, I made another SQL query to check for child links for each parent.

Function DisplayMenu(sMenu_id, iCurrPage, sSpacing)
    Dim oMainLinks, oSubLinks, sLinksMenu
    Set oMainLinks = SelectDB("SELECT ('<a href=""' + href + '"" title=""' + title + '""' + ' class=""nobr' + (CASE WHEN link_id = " & iCurrPage & " THEN ' current' ELSE '' END) + '"">' + link_text + '</a>') AS links_items, link_id FROM links WHERE parent_id = 0 AND menu_id = " & sMenu_id & " ORDER BY sort_order")

    sLinksMenu = ""
    If Not oMainLinks.EOF Then
        sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & sSpacing & "<ul>" & vbCrlf

        While Not oMainLinks.EOF
            sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & sSpacing & "    <li>" & oMainLinks("links_items")
            Set oSubLinks = SelectDB("SELECT ('<li><a href=""' + href + '"" title=""' + title + '"" class=""nobr"">' + link_text + '</a></li>') AS links_items, parent_id FROM links WHERE parent_id = " & oMainLinks("link_id") & " AND menu_id = " & menu_id & " ORDER BY sort_order")
    
            If Not oSubLinks.EOF Then
                sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & vbCrlf & sSpacing & "        <ul class=""nav-submenu"">" & vbCrlf
                While Not oSubLinks.EOF
                    sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & sSpacing & "            " & oSubLinks("links_items") & vbCrlf
                    oSubLinks.MoveNext
                WEnd
                sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & sSpacing & "        </ul>" & vbCrlf & sSpacing & "    "
            End IF
            sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu &  "</li>" & vbCrlf 
            Set oSubLinks = Nothing
            oMainLinks.MoveNext
        WEnd
        sLinksMenu = sLinksMenu & sSpacing & "</ul>" & vbCrlf
    End If
    DisplayMenu = sLinksMenu
End Function