cretaceous;11050187 wrote:I have a fairly big existing project - it manages text surveys made by employees and their employers.
Now the owner wants to offer it in two styles - luxury surveys and basic surveys.
Originally the luxury version was going to be a new domain, but now they want it on the single URL.
That seems wise if you have lists of users and/or authentication credentials. Otherwise, one might need to register in both places unless you concoct some kind of single sign-on thing.
cretaceous;11050187 wrote:I'm stuck on whether to make a complete new database for the luxury surveys - which will be easier to manage and less need to change loads of code.
Or I could add a new higher level 'survey' category and all that entails in terms of editing almost every piece of code.
(I could also do it as a set of new tables in the single db, that duplicates what's needed - that might be cleaner than a whole second db)
It's been my experience that copying-and-pasting code results in a project that gets harder to maintain in the long term. Imagine, for instance, you had to change the structure of a table. If you just copied everything, you have to make that changes in two places down the road, which takes twice as long. The more times you copy something, the more changes are required when you must change it.
And how does this change ALL your code? Seems to me it would only affect code that displays/collects/stores the surveys.
