Question

I’m developing an auctioning website. Each auction has a lot of options, that i want to be able to filter on the front-end.

I was wondering what is best practice in handling/storing these options (mostly booleans/checkboxes).

• Is it best practice to store them all in the same row ?
• Or would it be better to store them all in one “auction_options” table?

I guess the last option is the best one..but how would a query look like to:
select all auctions that have:

• state ohio
• state utah
• some other option

I just can’t get my head around this. Is this even possible ?

EDIT –> the reply to comment field was not enough

I created 3 tables:

• auction table -> a_id | a_desc | etc
• a_options table -> a_o_id | a_o_name | a_o_value
• a_options2auction table -> id | a_id | a_o_id

when i run this query:

SELECT * FROM auctions as A
INNER JOIN a_options2auction as B ON A.a_id = B.a_id
INNER JOIN a_options as C ON B.a_o_id = C.id
WHERE c.value = ‘groningen’ OR c.value = ‘utrecht’

it returns 2 rows that are both the same auction, that should not be possible 🙂

Answer 1

You can use an options table that is connected M-N to the auctions table.

Between these two tables you should build another table to connect them.

Auctions 
    |
Auctions_options
    |
Options

So a query would be like this

SELECT * FROM Auctions as A 
INNER JOIN Auctions_Options as B ON A.id_auction = B.id_auction 
INNER JOIN Options as C ON B.id_Option = C.id_Option 
WHERE C.Option_name = 'State' AND (B.value = 'ohio' OR B.value='utah' OR B.value = '...')

This solutions allow you to add infinites options to an auction and store their value (each auction can have different options from the others too)