Question

So, I’m dealing with an enormous online form right now. It’s separated into different sections visually, but those tend to change. With around 300 fields, it almost seems ridiculous to put them into a single table, though if I separate them and someone decides to move a field to a different section on the front end on several different occasions, it will become a mess in the database and fields won’t match their front end sections.

I’m essentially asking: What is the best way to organize something like this in a normalized fashion?

Answer 1

You could move the field names to another table and reference them in the value table.

Example

field_id   | field_name
------------------------
1          | first_name
2          | last_name

Then reference from the values:

value_id  | field_id   | value
--------------------------------
1         | 1          | John
2         | 2          | Doe
3         | 1          | Max
4         | 2          | Jefferson