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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T11:52:19+00:00

Here’s my problem… I am making a client managing interface that saves values to

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Here’s my problem…
I am making a client managing interface that saves values to SQL
I am using SQL/PHP/HTML/JQUERY/CSS etc…

Everything is ok when i all the information are entered once for each client.
ie. each client has 1 or 2 phone numbers, one address, etc.

The problem appears when i want to store say multiple receipt numbers of a client.
Or ie. multiple orders of the same client.

I could start with one but through time i might need to store 100.

What is the best practice to do this?

I thought of storing the ID’s separated by commas in a single text record in SQL
Then retrieve the values, separate them and serve them.

What is the best way to do such thing?
Also, how can i command SQL to add a value to the end of the existing string instead of updating it?
Can i automatically add a column to sql each time a similar record is needed?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could save it as comma separated values but this is very bad practise and ultimately becomes a pain to maintain.

    What you need to have here is SQL normalisation.

    For example, in the case of Receipts you have two tables, one for the customer, with a unique id field, and one for receipt which has two columns, customer Id and Receipt Number, so a table for your Customer details:

    Customers:
CustomerId INT
Address TEXT
Email TEXT

    And another table for receipts:

    Receipts:
CustomerID INT
ReceiptNum VARCHAR(9)

    Then to get all the Receipts for that customer,

    SELECT *
FROM Receipts
WHERE CustomerID = @ID

    And to add a new receipt:

    INSERT INTO Receipts (CustomerId, ReceiptNum)
VALUES (@ID, @Receipt)

    This is a very loose description but I hope it gives you the idea of what you need to do.

    Update:

    To give you a sample of how this will look, if you have 2 customers in the Customer Table:

    CustomerId   Address  Email
1            Here     test@test.com
2            There    test2@test.com

    And customer 1 has 2 receipts, and customer 2 has 3 receipts:

    CustomerId   ReceiptNum
1            abcdde10
1            qwerty10
2            1234-1234
2            0987-0987
2            abcd-efgh

    So the idea is that for each extra bit of information, you only need to add another row. That way you can have 1 bit of information for one customer, and 20 for another, but you don’t need to define 20 spare fields just in case.

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