Table with several data sources

I am not sure if ditto forum is the right place to post my problem, but I will try.

Please take a look at this page (the design is not ready): http://teeth-smile.de/seminare and try to click you through to the order form.

I think, that interface is easy to understand but my client wants a table like this:


conference 1 conference 2 conferenc 3
Berlin 05-20-08 06-21-08
Cologne 04-12-08
Leipzig 08-12-08 09-21-08 04-12-09
Munich

(Of course, Munich must not show up in the table, because there is no conference planed.)

This is structure of the documents/folders

conferences
subject 1
conference 1 (description of the conference)
052008-berlin (city and date; the city is a drop down TV, that is populated with data from the folder "city")

and so on.

The city folder contains a list of city (and each city folder may contain the address of an hotel).

city
Berlin
The Million Dollar Hotel
Cologne
Leipzig
Munich


So this is the task:

1. Only list the citys where one or more conferences are planned.
2. Attach a conference at the correct table cell.

Can I achieve this with help of ditto and &filters? Do I need phx? Do I have to change the document´s structure?

Any help would be welcome.

Thank you.

Would there be a fixed number of conferences horizontally?

What is the "subject 1" folder exactly? It seems kinda unneccessary. The way you’ve set up your content with so many subfolders seems overly complicated.
Why not simply:

conferences (top-folder)

-- conference 1 (2nd level)
-- -- Berlin 12.01.2008 (3rd level)
-- -- Leipzig 20.01.2008
-- -- Hamburg 03.02.2008

-- conference 2
-- -- Bonn 13.01.2008
-- -- Leipzig 21.01.2008
-- -- Hamburg 03.03.2008

-- conference 3
-- -- Berlin 12.02.2008
-- -- Leipzig 26.02.2008
-- -- Hamburg 07.03.2008


imo, you’d be better off with using a separate mysql-table for this. Maybe even 2 or 3 (cities, conferences, hotels).
Outputs like these are best presented with a "cross-tab" method (something you’ll frequently use if you have to create DB-queries for sales reports / Excel-outputs etc.)
Examples: http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2005/10/creating-crosstabs-in-mysql.html + http://www.evolt.org/article/Using_MySQL_and_PHP_to_Present_Excel_Spreadsheets/20/26896/index.html
Not for the faint of heart though...

Quote from: Mark at Jan 06, 2008, 04:12 PM

Would there be a fixed number of conferences horizontally?

No. It could be one to three. But maybe this problem could be solved using separate templates?

Quote from: ganeshXL at Jan 06, 2008, 05:07 PM

What is the "subject 1" folder exactly? It seems kinda unneccessary.

There shall be some main topics (about five to seven). For each main topic can be the mentioned one to three conferences in up to twenty cities.

Because there is only a limited number of cities where the conferencces will be hold I think it would be a better solution to store these (and the hotels) in an own folder to avoid superfluous data entries.


Quote from: ganeshXL at Jan 06, 2008, 05:07 PM

imo, you’d be better off with using a separate mysql-table for this. Maybe even 2 or 3 (cities, conferences, hotels).

Would it be possible to write data to more then one MySQL table with help of MODx?

Quote from: ganeshXL at Jan 06, 2008, 05:07 PM

Not for the faint of heart though...

Well, looking at the examples I´m becoming faint hearted

Quote from: Mazso at Jan 07, 2008, 12:55 AM

Because there is only a limited number of cities where the conferencces will be hold I think it would be a better solution to store these (and the hotels) in an own folder to avoid superfluous data entries.

Would it be possible to write data to more then one MySQL table with help of MODx?

Yes you can do this. Checkout eform and form2db.

Sorry for being late with my answer. I was offline some days. I will test eForm2db.