Best Approach for Multiple Options
| From: | Ralph Guzman | Date: | Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:52:18 +0000 |
| Subject: | Best Approach for Multiple Options | ||
| Groups: | php.general | ||
| Request: | Send a blank email to php-general+get-161528@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
I'm currently in the process of writing a real estate listings program
and I am not sure what the best approach is for storing and searching
through the property amenities. Example: houses or apartment amenities
can be a pool, fitness center, spa, etc.
Users must be able to search for listings within a specific price range,
location, amenities, or other criteria.
I can think of two ways of doing this:
The first approach, I can have the facilities table with all available
property, a table with all available amenities, and then another table
that will serve as an index where I will make use of foreign keys to
link property to amenities.
The second approach is to store amenities as a text delimited string for
each property in the facilities table. So if a certain property has a
pool, fireplace and fitness center, I would have
'pool|fireplace|fitness' in the amenities field. I can then use PHP to
explode or create an array so that I can manipulate the string.
Anybody have any thoughts or advice on this?