Question

I want a field in a table of SQL Server 2008 to contain a preset number of string values for user to be able then to select one value from a dropdown listbox in my WPF front-end app.

Is it possible only through assigning a numeric int type in a SQL Server table field and then doing all the stuff through C# front-end coding, or are there other ways?

Answer 1

There are two different ways you could do this (well, two that come to my mind). Neither are specific to Sql Server.

First, is to create a table which holds the values that go into the dropdown. This would be a very simple table such as

DayOfWeek
Name varchar(9) PK

and then reference it in other tables via a foreign key relationship

Hours
Id UniqueIdentifier PK
Day varchar(9) FK
…

The other way is to define an enum in your application

public enum DayOfWeek { Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, /*etc*/ }

and then save this as an int in your database (yes, you could use a different data type):

Hours
Id UniqueIdentifier PK
Day Int
…

If you expect the list to fluctuate at all, the first technique is better. If you expect the list to be static, the second one is usually easier to deal with in code.