Hello,
On May 15, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Brian Dailey wrote:
I have several large forms that I am putting together. I'm aiming
to keep them flexible and make it fit within the database object
schema that I have used so far in this particular program.
In the past with a large form I've seen some developers resort to
tables with a multitude of columns... I thought that this was a
kludgy solution and I'd like to avoid it if possible. Another way
I've seen it handled is to have a header table and a detail table
that works something like this:
table: documents (id, date, etc)
table: documentdetails (documentid, fieldname, fieldvalue)
All of the form values were stored in a fieldname=fieldvalue format
inside the table. This worked nicely until you attempted to run
reports on it - you couldn't easily combine data since it all
existed in different table rows.
So, I humbly come before thee, o PHP gurus, and ask you, how would
you advise approaching this? Are there other ways to handle huge
forms? I have seen people serialize arrays and store them in a
column, but I can't see that working well when creating reports.
I've googled and read around as much as I can on this one, but what
I need is some advice from some more experienced developers. Opinions?
My question is -- when the forms change, who makes the change? You,
or a user via a tool?
If you are making the change, then I would go with the flat table and
make your code flexible. It's nice to have a straightforward and
flat table. You can get your code pretty tight. This is can be most
problem anyways -- If you have a giant form, you can spend forever
fiddling with the html.
But if a user is the one making the change, then I would go with one
of the aforementioned solutions -- store everything in yaml, or
entity attribute value. I prefer EAV.
Cheers,
Patrick
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