Question

I’m trying to find the best way to retrieve fields from a table, depending on the value of another field, all of it administered from a webapp.

For example, let a table person contain 4 fields: name,surname,email,mobile.

And let have to an admin of the web app the possibility to specify if one of such fields is visible or not, for each entry, for example by setting a checkbox..

How can I address such problem?
Should i use the trivial solution of adding 4 more boolean fields to the table (or making another table for that purpouse) to control the visibility? eg.: b_name,b_surname,b_email,b_mobile

-or-

should I use a mask approach (eg.: storing somewhere 1101, basically meaning ‘do not show email for that entry’)?

Any other alternatives?

Answer 1

I’d suggest the boolean fields, yeah. Masks are cumbersome and run counter to the database paradigm (and what’s more, they’ll make adding or changing fields an issue later on.)