At 03:30 PM 8/20/2003 -0700, Scott Haneda wrote:
>What would be a good way to deal with the following...
>
>I have a form that has 5 checkboxes on it, lets say the checkboxes are for
>categories, and more than one can be selected.
>
>For example:
>please tell is what brochure you want
>[] car
>[] boat
>[] truck
>[] SUV
>[] beetle
<snip>
>I don't see the 5 categories being changed, so I could create 5 fields in
>one table, and tally them that way, or I could create one field and put the
>actual value in that field and tally them that way.
>
>Any suggestions are appreciated.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here. My intuition tells me to look for the
opportunity to add some data to this process... For example, what if a
record were created for each brochure that needed to be processed, and
suppose that in some back-end application the person fulfilling these
requests completed the data in the record... Then you might justify making
a separate table for each brochure (or one with a two column key)... Then
you would not waste space, you could gather statistics easily with joins,
and you'd satisfy both processes at once...
then again, if none of that back-end process exists, then it's probably
simplest to just make an integer column and bit-map the check-boxes into it
(if you want to save space)... or if you don't care about space just create
a true/false column for each check box.
The short answer is - more info is needed to pick the best approach.
HTH,
_M
