[Deprecated] DMZ 1.5.3 (DataMapper OverZealous Edition)

[eluser]OverZealous[/eluser]
I'm getting confused why it matters if they have the same parent category or not. Are the parent categories shared?

I think you are looking stuff up by 'name' when you should be looking them up by 'id'. If you looked them up by 'id', then you wouldn't have to do these crazy joins.

For example, say your web form looked like this:

Code:

Parent Category: [ Science       |V]
New Subcategory: [ Biology         ]

The parent category would be a select box with all of the current main categories for the user. Then you would have the absolute id, and you could check like this:

Code:

$parent = new Category();
$parent->get_by_id($this->input->post('parent_id'));
$sub = $parent->subcategory->where('name', $this->input->post('name'))->get();
if($sub->exists()) {
    // handle existing category
} else {
    // handle new category
}

Alternatively, if you prefer to let the user input the parent name manually, then you would write almost the exact same code, but replace $parent with $user, and subcategory with $category.

As long as users don't share categories, I'm not sure why it matters if another user has the same category name as another user.