Question

I’m currently researching a project for the place that I work in. We are trying to create a system that will allow forms to be set up dynamically from a database.

My question is what database structure would best suit something like this?

I currently have a structure of:

forms_form
forms_formfields
forms_formdata

I don’t think this is the most appropriate layout for this. Basically to make is make sense I need to be able to make a form within the database that can have infinite fields all customized and have the data when submitted stored in the database.

Answer 1

The proposed structure looks ok to me. form -> field is clearly 1:M relation, so you’ll need forms(id,...) and fields(id, form_id, type, ...). field->data is kind of 1:1, so theoretically a separate table is not needed, unless you allow one form to be used with different sets of data. If this is the case, i’d suggest datasets(id,...) and data(field_id, dataset_id, value).