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Asked: 2026-05-17T01:29:17+00:00

I’m after some best practice advice here. I have always preferred to store dropdown

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I’m after some “best practice” advice here.

I have always preferred to store dropdown list options in an array, rather than a database table. One of the main reasons for this is that it is a lot easier to re-arrange options as I wish. For example I have an array like this:

$sources=array(
   1=>'Google',
   2=>'Bing',
   3=>'Yahoo',
);

This is just a simple one I have put here to illustrate what I mean. The array key is actually the value that is submitted in the form, and the array value is the text that appears on the dropdown option.

The submitted value is stored in the database as an integer (as per above), and I can then query the array to get the corresponding textual value to display on the page.

Am I going about this in the proper way, or should I be storing the options in the database rather than an array?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The disadvantage to doing this is there’s no way to guarantee referential integrity. Certainly you’re right to store only the integer key in a database row (so you’re not storing the string “Google” repeatedly), but the problem is that the database itself has no idea what that key means.

    I’ve encountered three specific problems with code written in this way.

    First, what if a separate application wants to query the same database? This is not typical for PHP applications, but it certainly happens. If I wanted to write, say, a reporting engine for your data I’d have to copy bits of your source code in order to display “Google” instead of “1”.

    Even if you don’t anticipate another such application ever cropping up, why cut off the possibility entirely?

    Second, there’s no warning or process to prevent you from making an error when editing your list. If you remove option “3” thinking that there are no more “Yahoo” sources, you now have meaningless “3” values floating around in your database with no way to determine what they mean.

    By contrast, if you tried to delete “3” from a database lookup table you’d get a foreign key error if any matching rows were still around.

    Third, you cannot write a single query that automatically includes the name. Your query MUST return “2” and your PHP code must then substitute “Bing” for each row in the result set. It’s usually easier and faster to let the database do that processing.

    Now, this isn’t to say it’s fundamentally unacceptable to ever store values like this in PHP, and I’ve done it several times, but for most situations it’s better to have all your data in the same database.

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