Re: Data design question - newbie

what about having:

0 = batman movie a
1 = batman movie b
2 = batman movie c
4 = batman movie d
8 = batman movie e

<rob_at_benefitscheckup.org> wrote in message news:aienmk$bsc$1_at_news.netmar.com...
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I have no idea if there is a lot of traffic going on but I thought I would
> try
> to get a question answered.
>
> Forgive me if the question is a bit long-winded as well as my ignorance
> in db design...
>
> I have an application where users answer an extended questionaire. The
> questions are dynamically generated based on certain rules that are
> applied to previous answers. The end result is that there is no
> uniformity on what questions a user will get presented with or what
> questions a user will answer. Some users might get ten questions - some
> might get 50.
>
> Both the questions and possible answers (we call them answerfields) are
> represented in the database. There is a one to many relationship
> between questions and answers.
>
> For the most part there is only one answerfield per question.
> For instance, (not real examples):
>
> for the question: How many times have you seen 'Batman'?
>
> There would be a single answerfield called 'batman_views' that expects
> an number of some kind
>
> Sometimes however there are more than one answerfield per question
>
> for the question: which Batman movies have you seen?
>
> there would be muliple answerfields called 'batman' , 'batman returns',
> 'batman on vacation', and 'batman returns from vacation' each expecting
> a boolean response.
>
> The relationship between quesions and answerfields is used so that we
> can generate the questionaire.
>
> My quesion is: how do I model the responses? I was thinking of something
> like the following:
>
> A table that would have a column for the unique user_id, a column the
> answerfield_id, and then a third column to hold the response.
>
>
> So if my answfield table looked like this
>
> answerfield_id answerfield_name answerfield_type
> 1 batman number
> 2 batman returns boolean
> 3 batman on vacation boolean
> 4 batman returns from va boolean
>
> Then this result table
>
> user_id answerfield_id response
> 1 1 15
> 1 2 true
> 1 3 true
>
>
> Would represent a user had seen 'Batman' 15 times and had seen 'batman'
> and 'batman on vacation'.
>
> Obviously the problem with storing the results in this manner is that
> there is no way to check the integrity of 'response' field. I would
> have to store them all as strings. So if something messed up I could
> easily have a situation where it looked like a user had seen Batman true
> times or enjoyed the '15' batman movies. This seems very very bad.
>
> What am I missing?
>
> If this is not the place for this type of question please let me know
>
> Thanks in advance
> Rob
>
>
>
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abuse_at_newsone.net Received on Mon Aug 05 2002 - 10:05:19 CEST