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Asked: 2026-05-27T09:17:42+00:00

I’m building a web application that will essentially allow ‘admins’ to create forms with

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I’m building a web application that will essentially allow ‘admins’ to create forms with any number and combination of form elements (checkboxes, combo-boxes, text-fields, date-fields, radio-groups, etc). ‘Users’ will log into this application and complete the forms that admins create.

We’re using MySQL for our database. Has anyone implemented an application with this type of functionality? My first thoughts are to serialize the form schema has JSON and store this as a field in one of my database tables, and then serialize the submissions from different users and also store this in a mysql table. Another thought: is this something that a no-sql database such as MongoDB would be suited for?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, a document-oriented database such as MongoDB, CouchDB, or Solr could do this. Each instance of a form or a form response could have a potentially different set of fields. You can also index fields, and they’ll help you query for documents if they contain that respective field.

    Another solution I’ve seen for implementing this in an SQL database is the one described in How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data.

    Basically like your idea for storing semi-structured data in serialized JSON, but then also create another table for each distinct form field you want to index. Then you can do quick indexed lookups and join back to the row where the serialized JSON data includes that field/value pair you’re looking for.

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