Database structure

This tutorial uses two tables, menu_mnu and products_prd . The first one is used to retrieve data for the menu, while the second is used to display product details, when requested.

The menu_mnu table contains the following fields:

• id_mnu - is the primary key, and stores the id number of each page;
• idmnu_mnu - stores the id of the parent page;
• order_mnu - stores the order to show the elements
• visible_mnu - stores the state of the menu element: 1 for visible, and 0 for invisible
• name_mnu - stores the current menu entry name;
• desc_mnu - stores the tooltip for each menu element; this will be displayed as an alt text;
• title_mnu - stores the title for each page;
• content_mnu - stores content to be displayed in the page;
• url_mnu - stores the url to which the menu element will point to;
• target_mnu - stores the target for the url in the database. Can point to a frame, or a window setting (blank,self, etc)

For the first section of the tutorial, the last two fields will not be used, since the URL will be automatically generated from the page name and the id_mnu field.

The products_prd table contains the following fields:

• id_prd - is the primary key; stores the product id;
• name_prd - stores the products name
• desc_prd - stores the product description. This is the actual content to be displayed in the page.

For a visual description of the table structure, check out the following image taken from QuB (MX Query Builder):

Inside the downloaded package, in the tutorials folder, you will find database dumps that can be used for this tutorial. Choose the one corresponding to your particular server model, in order to ensure that the links contained in the URL field will point to the right pages. These files contain all content used through the site, and for the PHP model, the menu_mnu database dump contains the following data:

The products_prd table that can be created from the sql and mdb file provided, contains the following data (again, for the PHP model):

Through this tutorial you will need to alter the table fields, adding some more data to display in the menu. For the Microsoft Access databases, you will use MS Access, and for MySQL you can use PHPMyAdmin , available here.

To be able to use the provided tables with your tutorial files, import these tables into an existing database, or create a new one using the database management software of your choice. Specify this database when creating the connection in Dreamweaver.

In the next section you will create the files in your site.