Recursing Properly Through Related Entities - php

Question

I have a set of Organizations and their Board Members.
All organizations have board members and many board members are on the board of more than one organization.
I am using JIT Hypertree to illustrate their relationships. The JIT Hypertree schema requires that one item be the parent of all and is drawn based on a single JSON array.
I would love to have the re-centering event query and re-populate the graph based on the change. Then 2 levels would be fine but I have not been able to work out how to do that.
The code I have at present recurses manually for three levels from the starting organization but what I want is to re-curse through all related records.
So it would start with an Org and add Org's array of children (board members). Then fetch all of the boards (other than current Org) for each board member and add those as children of the board member.
This would continue until each trail dead ends - presumably at a board member who only belongs to one board.
Anyone have advice on how to create this array and avoid duplicates?
$board = $center->board();
$top['id'] = $center->ID;
$top['name'] = $center->Org;
$top['children'] = array();
if ($board) {
foreach ($board as $b) {
$child['id'] = $b->ID;
$child['name'] = (strlen(trim($b->Last)) > 0) ? $b->First . ' ' . $b->Last : 'Unknown';
$child['data']['orgname'] = $center->Org;
$child['data']['relation'] = $b->Role;
$child['data']['occupation'] = $b->Occupation;
$child['children'] = array();
$childboards = $b->boards();
if ($childboards) { foreach ($childboards as $cb) {
$gchild['id'] = $cb->ID;
$gchild['name'] = $cb->Org;
$gchild['data']['orgname'] = (strlen(trim($b->Last)) > 0) ? $b->First . ' ' . $b->Last : 'Unknown';
$gchild['children'] = array();
$childboardmembers = $cb->board();
if ($childboardmembers) { foreach ($childboardmembers as $cbm) {
$ggchild['id'] = $cbm->ID;
$ggchild['name'] = (strlen(trim($cbm->Last)) > 0) ? $cbm->First . ' ' . $cbm->Last : 'Unknown';
$ggchild['data']['orgname'] = $cb->Org;
$ggchild['data']['relation'] = $cbm->Role;
$ggchild['data']['occupation'] = $cbm->Occupation;
$ggchild['children'] = array();
$gchild['children'][]= $ggchild;
}}
$child['children'][]= $gchild;
}}
$top['children'][] = $child;
}
}
$top['data'] = array();
$top['data']['description'] = $center->Desc;
echo json_encode($top);
// Edit 2011.10.24 In Re hakre response
My data structure is a table of Organizations with unique IDs, a table of People with Unique IDs, and then a bridging table for the two specifying Organization (Entity) and Person and the Role the Person is playing in the Entity. A typical many-to-many. No sub-boards at all. I made an image of it which now seems kind of pointless but I'll add it at the bottom.
The JIT library data structure is a little nuts (to me) in that it goes like this in their band example:
Top: Nine Inch Nails
Child: Jerome Dillon
Child: Howlin Maggie (another band)
{all the bands' members and then all of their bands...}
So the organization (band) is treated as though it is a Person even though it is comprised of a number of Persons. And when I recurse using the code above I get (I think) terrible bloat but the JSON it makes works correctly despite bloat.
Example JSON and Example Visualization
// End Edit

Answer 1

Your question is hard to answer in the sense that your data-structure is mainly unknown.
For the graphical represenation you only need to provide simple relationships if I understand that correctly:
*- Parent
+- Child
+- Child
...
`- Child
Your data structure has a different format, I don't know specifically but it's something like:
Org <-- 1:n --> Board
Board <-- n:n --> Board # If you have sub-boards
Board <-- n:n --> Member
Whichever your data is represented, to map or transpose your data onto the required structure for the graphical representation, you need some functions that take care of that.
To do that you need to share classification/type between both and specific keys, so that you can look-up the needed data from the event to return the data. For example:
if (request_parent_is_org())
{
$id = request_parent_id();
$parent = data_get_board($id);
$parent->addChildrent(data_get_board_children($id));
}
else
{
... # All the other decisions you need to take based on request type
}
view_response_to_json($parent);

Answer 2

What you have with your many-to-many data model is a graph. JIT is designed for trees.
To put it another way, JIT will not correctly show the crossing lines that are represented in the data whenever a single person is connected to multiple organizations.
I'd recommend a proper network graph visualization - D3.js has a great implementation for modern browsers.
The JSON data format it uses is actually easier to implement given your table structure - for all the organizations and people, you define objects:
{
"name": "Mme.Hucheloup",
"group": 1
},
{
"name": "Afton School Board",
"group": 2
}
And for each association in your association table you define connection objects that wire them together:
{
"source": 1,
"target": 2
},
The fancy coding in D3 takes care of the rest. Good luck!

Answer 3

You can use function below:
function get_orgs_and_childs ($child_id, $found = array())
{
array_push ($found, $child['name']);
if($child['children'])){
$found[] = get_parents($child['id'], $found);
}
return $found;
}
Call it using:
$orgs = get_orgs_and_childs($child['id']);