Question

For some kind of inventory system, a user can create a item_type which has certain properties, now the amount of properties is variable per type.. How should I go with the DBStructure on this? Just make a X amount of propertyX fields, or is there some other way to achieve flexibility in this way?

note I don’t want to automaticly create tables, since that ain’t managable.

Answer 1

Have a property table which is linked n:1 to the item_type table like this:

TABLE item_type (
  item_type_id INT,
  ... )

TABLE properties (
  property_id INT, -- primary key
  item_type_id INT, -- foreign key for item_type
  key NVARCHAR(max), -- adjust type to your needs
  value NVARCHAR(max) )

So each item_type can have 0:n properties.