Create the desired URL - Should I Loop ?

Question

Hi there,

I am looking at writing an ecommerce platform just for working practice and a small project of mine. I am at the stage where i want to start writing the URL's and SEO friednly URL's.

My problem is i have wrote the system to have unlimited categories / sub categories and making my navigation is causing me some problems.

my ideal url would be:

http://mydomain.com/products/first-category/second-category/productname.aspx

and in order to achieve this i am thinking about looping back to the database where the parentid=. but i feel this is not going to be best practice and doing this for every category and sub category and product for each page seems wrong.

can anyone help how to achieve this ?

I have knowledge of using www.urlrewriting.net and writing the website in asp.net 3.5 but its the technical answer of looping gettings the names etc i need help with.

If you require anymore information i am happy to answer any questions and hope someone can help me achieve this.

Thanks

Answer 1

Just cache the entire table of categories to memory if you're worried about going back to database.

struct Category
{
  UInt32 CategoryId {get;set;}
  UInt32 ParentId {get;set;}
  string Name {get; set;}
  string Url {get; set;}
}

SELECT CategoryId, ParentId, Name, Url FROM Categories Order By CategoryId;

MyCategories = new Dictionary<UInt32, Category>();

while (rdr.Read)
{
  MyCategories.Add((UInt32)rdr["category_id"], new Category(........));
}

Now getting the complete path is just looping in memory

string path = "";
currentCategory = MyCategories[category_id];

while (currentCategory != nil)
{
  // StringBuilder here 
  path += "/" + currentCategory.Name;
  currentCategory = MyCategories[Category.ParentId];
}