Question

I am building the underlying database for a shop. There are 2 tables, one for garments and one which holds standard size charts. Garments are available in one or more sizes and the size charts contain several measurements for each size garment.

Example size chart table

id  size    waist   chest   hips    height
0   6       56      76      82      160
0   8       60      80      86      162
0   10      64      84      90      164
0   12      68      88      94      166 
1   6       57      75      82      160
1   8       61      79      86      162
1   10      62      83      90      164
1   12      63      87      94      166

Example garments table

garment_id  garment_name    garment_type    size_chart  available_sizes
0           Boating Jacket  jacket          0           8,10,12      
1           Polka Dot Skirt skirt           1           10,12

What I want to do is join them so that I have

    garment_id ...  size_chart  available_sizes  size_chart.id  size_chart.size       size_chart.(...)
    0          ...   0          8,10,12      0                  8
    0          ...   0          8,10,12      0                  10
    0          ...   0          8,10,12      0                  12
    1          ...   1          10,12        1                  10
    1          ...   1          10,12        1                  12

The problem I am having is how to join so that I get every number in the set (available_size) to have a corresponding entry for measurements….

Any ideas/suggestions/advice on how I am best to do this would be really useful!

Thanks.

Answer 1

Example garments table

garment_id  garment_name    garment_type    size_chart  available_sizes
0           Boating Jacket  jacket          0           8,10,12      
1           Polka Dot Skirt skirt           1           10,12

Is the root of all evil – so, speak after me:

I will never ever store more than one information in a single db field, if I want to access them seperately. Never.

On a more serious note, you would want to drop the available_sizes field from the garments table, instead do something like

CREATE TABLE available_sizes (
  id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
  garment_id INT NOT NULL,
  INDEX(garment_id),
  size_id INT NOT NULL,
  INDEX(size_id)
)

and populate it. This makes it easy to mark one size as sold out, maybe even add a qty_in_stock INT to the table, search for all garments of same type, which are available in a specific size, etc.