On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 05:23, Dave Mariner wrote:
> Please excuse me if you consider this to be off-topic, but this is the
> best place I can think of to ask the (slightly long-winded) question.
>
> Imagine you have a car database (MySQL driven). Different models have
> different optional extras (air-con, central locking, immobiliser etc).
> I need to store the optional extras in a searchable form - i.e. the
> customer may have a wish-list of electric windows, aircon, and power
> steering. However the optional extras list is not and will not be
> finalised when the system goes live (probably will never be
> finalised!). Therefore I cannot do the quick-and-dirty hack of putting
> all the options as binary fields in my car database, so must come up
> with a more elegant solution. I've thought of storing e.g. 10 tuples
> car.option1->aircon code, car.option2->powersteering code. etc. and
> also going down the header-detail route.
> My current quandry is to which is going to be better for the search
> aspect, considering I'd also like to give them a "best fit" option.
> Would it be to create a cursor on my fixed criterion (price, age etc)
> and then iterate through each of those manually in my php script (see -
> it isn't entirely off topic ;0) ) counting the matches for that record
> in the optional-extra detail table? Or would it be to do a select where
> (optionalextra1=mychoice1 or optionalextra2 = mychoice1 ......) and
> (optionalextra2=mychoice2 or optionalextra2 = mychoice2...... ) and
> .... etc etc (yeuch!).
>
> I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a more elegant way than
> either of these, but can't think of it at the moment.
>
> If you come up with the solution there's a beer in it for you the
> next time you're in Paphos, Cyprus!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Dave.
Why not have a table that contains carid and optionlink, where carid is
the identifier for a unique entry of car model and optionlink is ditto
for a particular option. So you have something like
Table car
carid (autoincrement unique key)
carname
......
Table options
optid (autoincrement unique key)
optdescription
Table optlink
carid
optid
Then you can do a select like
select car.carid, options.description .... from car, options, optlink
where car.carid = $whatever and car.carid = optlink.carid and
(optlink.optid = x or optlink.optid = y ...)
where you build the latter part from the list of options selected - maybe
from a dropdown list that you can dynamically build from table options.
I think I could have explained that better, but hopefully you get the
idea. If you need, I think I have some example code somewhere.
--
David Robley Techno-JoaT, Web Maintainer, Mail List Admin, etc
CENTRE FOR INJURY STUDIES Flinders University, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
"This is a sick bird," said Tom illegally.
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