Question

I’m developping an application with CakePHP and I’m experiencing some problems with my DB.
The problem is that I have some tables with these kind of columns: sex (male/female), kind(image, video, text, song, link,…), …

There is many way to solve this problem:

1. Creating linked tables listing sexes, kind of media, … but I already have many tables so I don’t want to overkill my DB.
2. Chose the data type ENUM for the columns but CakePHP don’t like it.
3. Use 1,2,3,… as an index for these columns and map an array in PHP for each columns (not a good idea in my opinion, where to instantiate these aray ?, hard to know the real value of an item in the db, …).
4. Use the real, full textual value of the column for each items in the table but it’s redundant so loss of memory.

Personally, I think that the 4th possibility is the best but I would like to have other opinions or ideas to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I’m thinking of an other way to solve it.
If I make a table for each list, I’ll have many tables with just a few item and it’s a problem for the maintenance of the DB.
But if I make a table called for ex. “app_contants” which have an id, a name and a category (ex.: ‘1’, ‘female’, ‘user_sex’). All tables which need a list item, will refer on this table and if I want a specific list of this table, I just have to make “$this->AppContants->find(‘list’, array(‘conditions’ => array(‘category’, ‘user_sex’)));”

What do you think about this ?

Answer 1

there are many solutions out there:

the array datasource for example

But I prefer working with class constants and static methods representing the enums:
http://www.dereuromark.de/2010/06/24/static-enums-or-semihardcoded-attributes/

A few months ago I even added Enum support in my baking templates.
Makes them work out of the box – no one needs the database enums anyway.