General Checkbox question

run_GMoney

How do you go about handling the storing of checkboxes in a database? Would you have a field for each checkbox item in your database and just enter a value for each one? Seems excessive to me, especially if you had a whole lot of checkboxes. Do you just insert one value, separated by commas into one field to handle multiple selections? I know this is a matter of good/bad database design but I've never seen any discussion over how they get handled. Anyway, that was just on my mind, thought I'd throw it out there.

brad_fears

It really all depends on your application. If all the checkboxes are related, then it wouldn't be a big deal to store them as a comma-separated value in a single field, (so long as you know how to parse the field for later use). A good example would be days of the week stored as "Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat" in a single field. You'd know that if 'Thu' wasn't there, they must not have checked Thursday for some reason. Easy enough...

However, if you have many checkboxes for unrelated information, it might get more time consuming to remember the reason for each value instead of having a descriptive table field. Readability is also an issue. You might be the only developer, so it may be easy for you to remember what "1,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,1" means, but for anyone else, they'd have to dig through all the code.

--Brad Fears

run_GMoney

My question is, if you use the POST method, what is stored in the $POST array? Would it store every item checked, or just the last one? It seems in my initial testing here that only the last item is getting parsed. I have a bunch of checkboxes all named 'treatment' and with:

$treatment = $_POST['treatment'];

I only get one value returned, even if more than one checkbox is checked.

brad_fears

Make sure you define you checkboxes as arrays in your form.

Then you should be able to treat the $_POST['treatment'] data as an array.

run_GMoney

Well how are the indexes incremented? For instance, how would you identify the second item in the $POST['treatment'] array? I would assume it isn't $POST[1]. Maybe something like $POST['treatment(1)']?? I mean, the $POST is an array already that stores all the posted values. So it's an array inside an array correct? Can you declare a separate array and just say:

$postarray = new Array();
$counter = 0;
while ($counter <= sizeof($_POST['treatment']))
{
  $postarray[$counter] = //$counter item in $_POST['treatment'] array. Not sure how to indicate this
}

Pardon my ignorance here it's just kind of difficult to wrap my head around things at the moment. Still kinda new to this stuff.

brad_fears

Don't make things too complicated. How about just re-assigning the array to a new variable to make life easier.

$new_array = $_POST['treatment'];

print_r($new_array);

That should work okay...

run_GMoney

I just wasn't sure if you could do it that easily. I thought about that but figured there was no way it could be done that easily. But thanks, that should work out just fine.