Goal: Have a dynamic list to check boxes which will be inserted into one field in the DB coma separates!

For example; I have check boxes for red(1), green(2), blue(3) and yellow(4). I want the client to select as many as they wish and insert the numbers into one field in the DB. So the field colors might have a value of 1,3,4.

Any ideas

Nick

that's a bad idea -- it will put your query performance into a coma

it's still a bad idea, but that's how you do it

This is going to be a large table of image file names and I want to include attributes, like colors, but the list is quite long and rather then have a wide table, which I have to constantly alter, I thought I would store the attributes in one simple field then when I want images with several attributes I query on LIKE IN().

What's bad?
Hi by the way.

Nick

the SQL to find all red images will be forced to use a table scan

the SQL to display all colour names for each image will be practically impossible to write -- try it yourself first before you commit to the comma-delimited design

The list is finite, from a lookup (label) table which is populated by a client form. I would like to store just the key from 'label'.

Create three tables, pictures, attributes, and picture_attributes. In the pictures table, include all of the information about a picture (size, format, URL or UNC, etc). In the attributes table, have one row for each attribute (red, large, pastel, landscape, etc). In the picture_attributes table, have one row for each attribute that a picture has: Picture one might have rows for landscape and JPEG and picture 937 might have rows for pastel and GIF.

-PatP

the solution which gave me the desired result was to rename the check boxes and customize the insert value.

The field name had to be renamed to: from theme to theme[] to create the array.

the insert had to be customied form:
<?php echo((isset($_POST["theme_img[]"]))?$_POST["theme_img[]"]:"") ?>

to
<?php echo(isset($_POST['theme_img[]'])?implode(", ", $_POST['theme_img[]']):""); ?>

the next task is to figure out how to populate the correct check boxes on the update page!

I'll be back.

Nick