Question

Just to save anyone reading this time and trouble, DO NOT use this method to store surveys. As pointed out in the answer, this is incredibly poor programming (not to mention dangerous to kitties)

Forgive me if this question is somewhat convoluted. I’m working on building a program that allows users to create surveys and post them for users to take.

Long story short, I have a table that looks like this:

**survey_info**

id          bigint(20)     Auto_increment     Primary Key
title       varchar(255)
category    bigint(20)
active      tinyint(1)
length      int(11)
redirect    text

now, when a survey is created, a new table is also created that is custom built to hold hte input for that survey. The naming schema I’m using for these new tables is survey_{survey_id}

What I’m hoping to do is in the list of surveys, put the number of responses to a survey to the right of it.

Alright, now my actual question is this, is there a way to retrieve the number of rows in the collection table (survey_id) within the same query I’m using to gather the list of available surveys? I realize that I can do this easily by just using a second query for each survey and grab it’s rowcount, but my fear is that the larger the number of surveys the user has, the more time-consuming this process will become. So is there any way to do something like:

SELECT s.id AS id, s.title AS title, c.title AS ctitle, s.active AS active, s.length AS length, s.redirect AS redirect, n.num FROM survey_info s, survey_category c, (SELECT COUNT(*) AS num FROM survey_s.id) n WHERE s.category = c.id;

I just don’t know for sure how to use the s.id as part of the other table’s name (or if it can even be done)
Any help, or even a point in the right direction would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You create a relational model that will store all surveys options in one table. This is a sample design:

survey
------
id PK
title

surveyOption
--------------
id PK
survey_id FK
option

surveyResponse
--------------
id PK
surveyOptionId FK
response