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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T13:56:40+00:00

I am playing around with learning MVC and want to create a recipe recorder

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I am playing around with learning MVC and want to create a recipe recorder application to store my recipes.

I am using .net with Sql Server 2008 R2 however I don’t think that really matters with what I am trying to do.

I want to be able to record all of the measures I use. In my country we use metric however I want people to be able to use imperial with my application.

How do I structure my table to cope with the differences, I was thinking of storing all of the measurements as ints and have a foreign key to store the kind of weight.

Ideally I would like to be able to share the recipes between people and display the measurements in their preferred way.

Is this the right kind of way

IngredientID PK
Weight int
TypeOfWeight int e.g. tsp=1,tbl=2,kilogram=3,pound=4,litre=5,ounce=6 etc
UserID int

Or is this way off track? Any suggestions would be great!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you are storing weights (a non-discrete value) I would strongly suggest using numeric or decimal for this data. You have the right idea with the typeofweight column. Store a reference table somewhere showing what the conversion ratio is for each (to a certain standard).

    This gets quite tricky when you want to show ounces as TSP, because the conversion depends on the ingredient itself, so you need a 3rd table – ingredient: id, name, volume-to-weight ratio.

    Example typeofweight table, where the standard unit is grams

    type   | conversion
gram   | 1
ounce  | 28.35
kg     | 1000
tsp    | 5            // assuming that 1 tsp = 5 grams of water
pound  | 453.59

    Example ingredient volume to weight conversion

    type   | vol-to-weight
water  | 1
sugar  | 1.4          // i.e. 1 tsp holds 5g of water, but 7g of sugar

    So to display 500 ounces of sugar in tsp, you would use the formula

      units x ounce.conversion x sugar.vol-to-weight
= 500   x 28.35            x 1.4

    Another example with 2 weights

    Ingredient is specified as 3 ounces of starch.  Show in grams
= 3 x 28.35    (straightforward isn't it)

    or

    Ingredient is specified as 3 ounces of starch.  Show in pounds
= 3 * 28.35 / 453.59
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