Question

I am interested in creating an application that can create quizzes, by suplying a quiz name, questions and 4 possible answers (1 correct, 3 incorrect). These quizzes will be accessible to the user and certain user types can edit them, while others can answer them.

Should I separate the questions and answers in different tables? Or should I just have a question table, with 4 fields for the answers?

If you have done this before, what other considerations should I take when creating this quiz generator?

Answer 1

I’d say your relationships should be something like:

User hasMany Quiz
Quiz hasMany Question
Question hasMany Answer

Quiz belongsTo User
Question belongsTo Quiz
Answer belongsTo Question

This would allow you to have more than 4 answers, if the requirements ever changed.

Things to consider perhaps:

How are you going to test if the answer is correct? Boolean, string comparison?

What if a given question asks for something that you couldn’t easily show in a “yes/no” or “true/false” situation? This problem may never arise if you want to limit to multiple choice, but it could.

How are you going to grade the quiz? Another table to store statistics about a users quiz history? Or is it a one off, using sessions?

using save all

// view
echo $this->Form->create('Question', array('action'=>'add'));
echo $this->Form->input('Question.name', array('label'=>'Question name'));
echo $this->Form->input('Answer.0.title', array('label'=>'Answer'));
// etc

// add method
if (!empty($this->data)) {
    $this->Question->saveAll($this->data, array('validate'=>'first'));
}

should be all you need ~