Custom Fields

[nvishnu]

Hi,

I need to design a model where we need to provide custom fields based on the
customer. E.g; customer A may have 10 contact fields while customer B may
have 5 more additional contact fields. This may be enhanced in future to
other tables in the application and also users may be able to add custom
fields from the application. We currently are an ASP and all of clients
reside on same database. Would there be any implication of doing something
like this (custom fields) with having single database. I assume so. Is it
better in that case to have each customer his own db and a master meta db to
control each one's settings. Any ideas or thoughts is appreciated.

Thanks.

Navin

 

[Rick B]

This is a classic one-to-many relationship. The "contacts" would need to be
in a new table and they would need to be related to the customer table.

This issue is addressed in this newsgroup all the time.

Rick B

 

[John Vinson]

Hi,

I need to design a model where we need to provide custom fields based on the
customer. E.g; customer A may have 10 contact fields while customer B may
have 5 more additional contact fields. This may be enhanced in future to
other tables in the application and also users may be able to add custom
fields from the application. We currently are an ASP and all of clients
reside on same database. Would there be any implication of doing something
like this (custom fields) with having single database. I assume so. Is it
better in that case to have each customer his own db and a master meta db to
control each one's settings. Any ideas or thoughts is appreciated.

"Fields are expensive; records are cheap".

Adding new fields for new contacts is not correct relational database
design! You should have two tables in a one to many relationship,
Customers to Contacts. Each contact is a new record, not a new field.

If you mean that the nature of the information stored for a contact is
different - i.e. one customer wants to store the contact's eye color
and shoe size, and the other customer doesn't - then you've got a
different problem, but that's not obvious from what you post. Is that
the case?

John W. Vinson[MVP]
Join the online Access Chats
Tuesday 11am EDT - Thursday 3:30pm EDT
http://community.compuserve.com/msdevapps

 

[nvishnu]

Yes thats exactly is the case.

"Fields are expensive; records are cheap".

Adding new fields for new contacts is not correct relational database
design! You should have two tables in a one to many relationship,
Customers to Contacts. Each contact is a new record, not a new field.

If you mean that the nature of the information stored for a contact is
different - i.e. one customer wants to store the contact's eye color
and shoe size, and the other customer doesn't - then you've got a
different problem, but that's not obvious from what you post. Is that
the case?

John W. Vinson[MVP]
Join the online Access Chats
Tuesday 11am EDT - Thursday 3:30pm EDT
http://community.compuserve.com/msdevapps