Browsing through examples all over the web, I can see that people generate the path using something like "parent_id.node_id". Examples:-
uid | name | tree_id
--------------------
1 | Ali | 1.
2 | Abu | 2.
3 | Ita | 1.3.
4 | Ira | 1.3.
5 | Yui | 1.3.4
But as explained in this question - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2797720/sorting-tree-with-a-materialized-path, using zero padding to the tree_id make it easy to sort it by the creation order.
uid | name | tree_id
--------------------
1 | Ali | 0001.
2 | Abu | 0002.
3 | Ita | 0001.0003.
4 | Ira | 0001.0003.
5 | Yui | 0001.0003.0004
Using fix length string like this also make it easy for me to calculate the level - length(tree_id)/5. What I'm worried is it would limit me to maximum 9999 users rather than 9999 per branch. Am I right here ?
9999 | Tar | 0001.9999
10000 | Tor | 0001.??