Re: Data design question - newbie

Hi Stu,

Thanks for the response!

I am sorry that my question wasn't clear about the types of responses possible. I was trying to show that depending on the answerfield, the expected resonse could be a number, a boolean, a string or specific value from a set.

I want to figure out a way to insure integrity so that I don't have a situation where I get the Answer: '82' to the question 'Are you male or female?'. Aside from having a separate table per answer I am not sure how to do this....

Any thoughts?
Thanks a lot Rob

In article <1028534728.8948.0.nnrp-07.3e3113e0_at_news.demon.co.uk>, Stu <stu_at_nospamuk.com> writes:
>what about having:
>
>0 = batman movie a
>1 = batman movie b
>2 = batman movie c
>4 = batman movie d
>8 = batman movie e
>16 = batman movie f
>
>then storing the result as an integer. Because we use powers of 2 for the
>id any combination can be OR ed together (read added) to create a value that
>will be unique for any set of batman movies.
>
>Is this a good idea?
>
>cheers
>stu
>
><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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