Multiple Entries in a field enquiry

graham1972

Hi guys,

I'm just after a little bit of guidance really. If I have a field in a table, is it possible to have more than one entry in that field and seperate them by either a , or a ; or something like that?

For example:-

Field 1 - graham
Field 2 - david, bob, ian, nick, robin
Field 3 - simon

What I am aiming to do is have field 2 as a link through to a search page which searches on whatever name you click on so if you click on david it will bring up a search page listing all the pages with david in or if you click on bob it will bring up bobs pages.

Hope that makes sense, is it possible to do ?

Appreciate your help.

Regards

Graham

thorpe

of course its possible. have you tried it?

graham1972

i don't know how to start that's why I'm on here. At the moment I am using five seperate fields - search1, search2, search3, search4, search5 but want to combine them into one but separate the items. I'm stumped as none of the books I have show it and I can't find anything using google.

thorpe

i take it you know how to insert the items into a db. to retrieve them, you'll need to use the LIKE clause. eg;

"SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE fld LIKE '%bob%';"

this would search through the field for a string containing the word bob.

Lars_Berg

Storing multiple values in a column is bad database design so it should be avoided. Search for articles on normalization.

leatherback

However,

it sounds like you ar e getting to the heart of relational database issues, and you really should start looking at linked tables.

e.g.:
You have one main table with a bunch of info for pages. Each page get a page id in this table.
In an other table, you have eg. users (Rob, Bob, Bo and luke). The users get their ID here, and all the details of these persons are stored in this table.

In a third table you store the relation between pages and people./
Page_nr | Person Nr.

This way any person can be match against any table.

Great benefit is the ability to change the details of people without having to go to each record in the pages database and modify it. It is called database nortmalisation, I believe, in case you want to search for more info

leatherback

Hehe,

Lars beat me to it!