Question

I have several list boxes in my web application that user has to fill. Administrator can add/remove/edit values in the combo box from controle panel. so problem is what is the best way to keep these combo box in database.

one way is keeping each table for each combo box. I think this is very easy to handle but I will have to create more than 20 tables for each combo/list box.And I think whether it is good practice to do so.

anotherway is keeping one table for all combo box. But I am worring when deleting data in this case.
If I want to remove India from countr coloum in combo box table, then I will be in problem. I may have to update it to null or some otherway and have to handel this in programming side.

Am I correct. can you help me ?

Answer 1

Another possibility would be to save the combo box data as an array or a json string in a single field in your table, but whether you want to do this or not depends on how you want your table to function and what you application is. See Save PHP array to MySQL? for further information.

EDIT:

I’m going to assume you have a combo-box with different countries and possibly another with job titles and others.

1. If you create multiple tables then yes you would have to use multiple SQL querys, but the amount of data in the table would be flexible and deleting would be a one step process:

   mysqli_query($link,"DELETE FROM Countries WHERE Name='India'");
   

2. With the json or array option you could have one table, and one column would be each combo-box. This would mean you only have to query the table once to populate the combo-boxes, but then you would have to decode the json strings and iterate through them also checking for null values for instance if countries had 50 entries but job titles only had 20. There would be some limitations on data amount as the “text” type only has a finite amount of length. (Possible, but a nightmare of code to manage)

You may have to query multiple times to populate the boxes, but I feel that the first method would be the most organized and flexible, unless I have mis-interpreted your database structure needs…

A third possible answer, though very different, could be to use AJAX to populate the combo-boxes from separate .txt files on the server, though editing them and removing or adding options to them through any way other than manually opening the file and typing in it or deleting it would be complex as well.