A tables field containing an array. Possible??

BIOSTALL

Hey,

I am creating a poll/voting feature for my forum and i want to make it so that a user can only vote once per poll. So what i plan to do is store everyone username who was voted in an array and store it in a MySQL table. When someone else votes, i'll extract the array from the database, add the current voters username to the array and then write the array back to the database.

Is this possible?? If not, what other ways could i achieve a similar result??

Thanks, BIOSTALL

devinemke

why not simply store the user ID in the votes table along with each vote. then simply do a check to see if that user is already in the table. if it is, don't let them vote.

BIOSTALL

Thanks for the suggestion, i'll look into it.

However, if i did want to be awkward and do it the way i suggested, would it be possible??

BIOSTALL

thorpe

anything is possible.

Drakla

If you did want to be awkward and defy db normalisation logic then you could have a table with a poll id and csv of user ids of who's voted, or even a serialised array. You'd then have to explode or use RLIKE with an appropriate regex to find out if someone had already voted, or suck it out and unserialise it. But really - let the db do the work and just have a pollid, userid table and you're up up and away.

BIOSTALL

thorpe wrote:
anything is possible.

How very helpful, lol.

@:
Thanks, i will have a go now

BIOSTALL

Sxooter

You're thinking like a programmer, and it's usually better to put on your database hat when doing these things.

That said, many rdbm systems support some type of array (PostgreSQL certainly does) but I recommend against using them unless a relational answer just doesn't work for you or the performance difference of the array method over the relational model is great enough to justify it.

I'd have a table of users, a table of surveys, a table of answers, and then just use a many to many relationship to both show what their answers were and if they've voted.

If you want it to be anonymous, it actually gets simple, just multi join the users to the surveys in a two column table and use that to find out if they've voted.