Question

I’m writing a CMS for various forms and such, and I find I’m creating a lot of drop-downs. I don’t really feel like mucking up my database with tons of random key/string value tables for simple drop-downs with 2-4 options that change very infrequently. What do you do to manage this in a responsible way?

This is language-agnostic, but I’m working in Rails, if anyone has specific advice.

Answer 1

We put everything into a single LookUp table in the database, with a column that mapped to an enum that described which lookup it was for (title, country, etc.).

This enabled us to add the flexibility of an ‘Other, please specify’ option in lookup dropdowns. We made a control that encapsulated this, with a property to turn this behaviour on or off on a case-by-case basis.

If the end user picked ‘Other, please specify’, a textbox would appear for them to enter their own value. This would be added to the lookup table, but flagged as an ad hoc item.

The table contained a flag denoting the status of each lookup value: Active, Inactive, AdHoc. Only Active ones would appear in the dropdown; AdHoc ones were those created via the ‘Other, please specify’ option.

An admin page showed the frequency of usage of the AdHoc values, allowing the administrators of the site to promote common popular values into general usage (i.e. changing their Status flag to Active).

This may well be overkill for your app, but it worked really well for ours: the app was basically almost entirely CRUD operations on very business-specific data. We had dozens of lookups throughout the site that the customer wanted to be able to maintain themselves. This gave them total flexibility with no intervention from us.