Question

for a current customer project, i’ve developed a CMS that stores products.

Products are entries that have some properities like title, text & etc.
However, some clients want to have different properties like price, color & etc.

I try to make my code as generic as possible so i don’t want to modify the code
for each customer.

My Question:
How can i design such a database, that a product can have infinite, multiple properties?
How to create/generate forms for such a different design?

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

you need to have two tables:

CREATE TABLE products( product_id INT, product_name VARCHAR, ... );
CREATE TABLE product_properties( product_id INT, property_name VARCHAR, property_value VARCHAR );

---

The first table contains one product per row with their unique ID and their common properties

--------------------------------------------------------
|  id  |      name       |   other common properties...
--------------------------------------------------------
|  1   |      apple      |   ...
|  2   |      bentley    |
|  3   |      ...        |
|  ... |      ...        |

The second table relates each product to its non-common properties:

----------------------------------------------------
| id   |    property_name   |    property_value    |
----------------------------------------------------
|  1   |    color           |    red               |
|  1   |    size            |    large             |
|  2   |    wheel count     |    4                 |
|  2   |    top speed       |    200               |
|  2   |    airbags         |    yes               |
|  ... |    ...             |    ...               |

You get a product’s information with two queries, first you get the common properties:

SELECT product_name, ... FROM products WHERE product_id = 2

then the non-common properties:

SELECT property_name, property_value FROM product_properties WHERE product_id = 2