There should really be another table for all of this information. Say you're tracking school information for a specific person. That person would have an ID number and you'd store the school information in a separate table that stores the user's ID and the school ID. You could even expand this to track other items by adding a third column that says the item being tracked is a school, spell, item, etc. This may seem like a pain now, but it's going to be the most scalable solution. Using serialize, what happens when someone has all 40 schools and it's over 255 characters? Do you make them all text columns? An ideal solution would involve a variety of tables. Table 1: Users. This would store user information such as name, rank, etc, and assign each one a unique ID. Table 2: Schools. This would list all of the possible schools that someone can take and assign each one a unique ID. Table 3: Spells. This would list all of the possible spells and assign each one a unique ID. Table 4: Call it what you want but this table is going to link the user IDs to school and magic IDs. If a user (User_ID=1) has schools abjuration (ID=2) and conjuration (ID=5), then you'd have two rows in this linking table, 1-2 and 1-5. Okay... I've blabbered enough. ---John Holmes... > -----Original Message----- > From: Shiloh Madsen [mailto:shiloh_madsen@nsc-support.com] > Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2002 12:48 AM > To: php-db@lists.php.net > Cc: php-general@lists.php.net > Subject: [PHP] Enum table entry > > Have a question that im trying to figure out how to resolve. I have a > field type in mysql that is of the enum type. Unless youre familiar with > Dungeons and Dragons, you wont get what the values mean, but hopefully > youll get the gist anyway. I have a column labelled school which holds an > enum data type comprised of the values 1 through 40. From the website > front end, where the data is being entered, i want to display, ideally a > series of checkboxes, otherwise a list which would allow a user to select > multiple items in that will translate into this enum field. For instance, > a series of checkboxes with items such as abjuration, conjuration, > divination, and others, which will all have a numeric value which gets > plugged into the enum field. for instance, if a user selected abjuration, > and divination, it would be plugged into sql as 1, 3 (or however enum data > is input into its column). That being the case how do i utilize php to get > this to work? what kind of form elements etc... The problem im seeing with > checkboxes are that they are discreet and dont group together, so i cant > get all the data to go into one column in mysql. Hopefully i havent > horribly confused the issue and some kind soul out there can tell me how > to send this data across. As a double nice thing...how would you write it > to pull the data back out...ie, convert 1, 3 to show abjuration, > divination? Thanks for the help in advance. -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
