Question

I’m designing a PHP Products system which is required to be very general, in that each product may have a number of options (“height”, “width”, “colour”, “gender”, etc.) but that some products may not have those options, and some may have none.

For example, a chest of drawers may have “size” (list of appropriate sizes set somewhere by the website user), “polished” (yes/no) and “painted” (yes/no). However, a new TV may have no options at all.

Can anyone recommend a way for the user to set the options they require for their products (for example, the “polished” would not be relevant at all for an electrical retailed) and then to store prices for various combinations of options as they specify for each product?

Answer 1

`options` text null,

 //DONT run this directly, it needs escaping...but you get the idea.
 insert into tablename values({['polished':(int)1, 'size':'oh_its_big']}), ({['color':'hotpink']});


//run your query
$query = $db->select("* from tablename");

//loop query, json_decode the options string and assign to array
foreach($query as $q)
{
   $tmp[] = (array)json_decode($q->options);
   foreach($tmp as $options)
   {
       //run some conditional statements
       if(array_key_exists('size', $options))
       {
            //do something
       }
   }
}