How would you do that?

[mrhatch]

Hi,

I'm stuck with a problem I've been thinking about for the last 3 days. The situation is the following:
I'm storing events and customers in a database. That's easy so far, isn't it? The customers are participating in a series of events, so I'm storing - let's say - 10 recordsets for one series of events. Now my problem is that I don't want just create a table storing the customerID and the eventID plus a field for absent or present, my idea is to build an array like the following:
4;0;1;8;1;0;12;0;0;
What does that mean? It' fairly easy to explain. Customer no.4 wasn't present, but had an excuse and will get the chance to repeat the lesson. Customer no.8 wasn't present and didn't give an excuse, so he/she will not be allowed to repeat. And finally customer no.12 was present, didn't have a reason to give any excuses and therefore doesn't need to repeat anything.
Creating a table probably is much easier, but I want to have it that way, I don't have any special reason for that, but also no clue how to write the necessary functions to create, edit, save or draw any conclusions about my customer's behaviours.
So any idea from you will be welcomed, because I still am quite a newbie to php...

Greets, Mr. Hatch.

[michael]

That is the most insane thing I've ever heard.
=)

But I would use explode if I were you.

(If you insist not to ingratiate the structure into a db.)

[mrhatch]

Oh, is it, really? I thought it might be useful avoiding the creation of yet another table, and another, instead moving around in an array like that.
So I think, this is a bit too high for a newbie, but might come in handy for the pros among you...
...I will return to the classic "create table" method, for that will not make my brains so sick. :-)

[michael]

I was kidding you.

If you were to put all values in one record, you would have to be assured you would have need for all of them. For example, if this is a membership meeting:

1. Fight Club Meeting Attandance.
2. You need to show everyone who was there.
3. You will rarely, if ever, look for one particular person in a meeting.

This would work well as a flat file or as a record in a db.

It would preclude the use of full tables. But the real question is why would you use the harder method?

If you knew you only were interested in the meeting, and it's characteristics, and not individual people, and theirs, then you ahve the right idea. (As I'm sure you do, as it's your project.)

Sorry if I came off a little strong. It was late.

[zebrax]

You should look into bitwise operators here and here
Since everything you want to store in the array is "yes" or "no" you can store everything with one number by turning bits on or off.

[mrhatch]

@: You're right, it's my project, but in the meantime I don't really see any valuable advantage of the "harder method" as well.
For me, it is much more necessary to observe people's attendances than anything else, but it turned out to be much easier to have a simple table recording everything.

@: Thanks, php-help is such a large file, I often don't see the right pages. I'll definitely spend some time perusing this.