A general question on php programming

[apok69]

I've had this idea that I've been thinking about for a while, and because I haven't programmed in a long time, I didn't know where to start. I'm thinking that the LAMP model will work for me but I don't know.

So I would have tables like this:

Widgets table

   c1   c 2    c 3    c4

w1 1 0 2 4
w2 0 0 0 1

Gears table

   c1   c 2    c 3    c4

g1 2 1 2 4
g2 3 0 0 1

Cogs table

   c1   c 2    c 3    c4

cog1 2 1 2 4
cog2 3 0 0 1

There would be more tables then this with more columns, and keys to tie them together. But just using these as a small representative.

What I want to do is then have users create possible combination's of widget, gears, and cogs based a particular value or multiple values. For example, total value of c1 is greater then or equal to 2. That would give:

w1, g1, cog2
w1, g1, cog3
w1, g2, cog1
w1, g2, cog2

Because of the potential amount of tables probably over 20, and the possibility that there might 100s of users at some point using the system, I wanted to find out what's the best way to implement working with the data. I.e. create all the combination's in temp tables for each session or some how use PHP (I haven't used it much so but I'm assuming I can use array functions) to manage it all. I would also to be able to present the data and rework it the search parameters for the users very quickly.

Thanks

[johnpeace]

Sounds like a candidate for the entity/attribute model.

Widgets table

id
name
desc

Attributes table

id
name
desc

entity_attributes

entity_id
attribute_id

Then, as you create your app...when you add/edit a new widget, it can have any number of attributes. When you add an attribute, check the attributes table to see if it's there, if not, put it there, get it's id and add a row to entity_attribute with the widget_id and the attribute_id.

That would be a little more efficient than dozens of tables holding an unknown number of possible combinations.