tick boxes in 1 db column ?

rickyspires

hello.
can (or rather how can) i put multiple checkboxes in to 1 db column?

so, can i do this in 1 table:

id - tick box id
1 - 1,2,3
2 - 4,5,6
3 - 7,8,9

and then relate that table to another table

tick box id - name
1 - name1
2 - name2
3 - name3
etc..

if so,
what format would i use in the db? varchar, enum or set (1,2,3 or '1','2','3')
and
how would i echo them out with the names from the second table?

thanks

NogDog

I'm not exactly sure what you want to do or what the functional requirement is; but as a general rule of good DB normalization, you only want to store one data "entity" per column. While there can be some exceptions to that rule, it may be that you need a separate relational table that allows you to have one "tick box" ID (or value, or whatever it is you need to store) per table row, with another column being the main table row's primary key to which you are relating that value.

rickyspires

thankyou for your reply 🙂

i did get it working by putting them in to seprate rows but i could see a problem.

what would would happen if i had 20, 30 or even 50 tick boxes ?
then it would start to get messy.

for example:

a table for tick boxes

so, can i do this in 1 table:
id - tick box name
1 - name 1
2 - name 2
3 - name 3

etc up to 50

and then another table of users (for example)

and user 1 ticked 20 of the 50 boxes. i would need to create seprate 20 rows for each tick box.

like:

user_id tick boxes selected
1 - tick box1
1 - tick box2
1 - tick box3
1 - tick box4
1 - tick box5
2 - tick box1
2 - tick box2
3 - tick box3
3 - tick box4
3 - tick box5

etc etc etc etc etc etc

so the problem is:
when they press sumit how would it create all those separate tick box rows

i guess when viewing the user you would you use something like

$sql = "SELECT * FROM "tick box table" WHERE id=".$tick_box_id."";

Derokorian

Example insert:

$sql = "INSERT INTO user_ticks (user_id,tick_id) VALUES ";
if( ISSET($_POST['tickbox1']) ) $sql .= "(".$uid.",1), ";
if( ISSET($_POST['tickbox1']) ) $sql .= "(".$uid.",2), ";
// .... for all tick boxes, this can be done with a loop (possibly the same loop that created them)
$sql = substr($sql,0,-2);
if( mysql_query($sql) ) echo "Tick box choices added to database.";
else  echo "Tick box choice error";

You know or something a long those lines.

rickyspires

thanks for all your help 🙂