Question

I am trying to fix a project that someone else coded, it is a mess!

On an edit user profile page they have something like this below which will list all available radio select boxes for the options a user can select for there education level, this is just 1 item, there is many items like it so based on the answers here, I can apply it to many other features on this code.

They used an array for many profile fields, it would store possible answers, A user can only choose 1 answer though in this case. So for education, there is 7 possible answers and a number corresponding with it’s number in the array is stored in a mysql DB, they store this 1 number as a varchar 255 length which can’t be good.

Should I store it as a varchar with 1 for length or use enum and list the 7 options, or something else?

Education

<?PHP
// Array of possible education profile selections
$arr_education[1]="No Answer";
$arr_education[2]="High school";
$arr_education[3]="Some college";
$arr_education[4]="In college";
$arr_education[5]="College graduate";
$arr_education[6]="Grad / professional school";
$arr_education[7]="Post grad";

// shows the array above as checkboxes on a form
foreach($arr_education as $ind=>$val) {  
    echo '<input type="radio" name="education" value="' .$ind. '" ' if($education==$ind){ echo "checked";}. '>' .$val. '<br>';
}



//on a users profile page there would be something like this
$education = 7; // seven would be Post Grad from our array above
echo $arr_education[$education]

//Now here is the mysql table, they chose to use a varchar(255) which seems retarded, using the above code, the max result would be 1 charachter long
education   varchar(255)

?>

Answer 1

If this was a new project, I’d recommend using ENUM. It’s space efficient (it’s actually stored on 1 byte) and simple to use. However, if you have to support legacy code then I’d recommend sticking to raw numbers and change that column into a TINYINT.

Additionally, I’d recommend replacing the numbers in your PHP source code with constants, so that you don’t have to guess what the code does. For example:

define('EDU_NO_ANSWER', 0);
define('EDU_HIGH_SCHOOL', 1);
define('EDU_SOME_COLLEGE', 2);
// etc...

if ($education >= EDU_SOME_COLLEGE)
{
    // student went to college, but you didn't need that
    // comment to know that
}