With this idea of an "etc" field, it makes it not only a pain to update (everything has to be updated), but a pain if you wanted to search for a specific row.
The "userfields" table is only used by custom profile fields. You should not add your own columns to it.
hello Chris. nice 2 c u
but about that idea, there is some ways that can support this weakness. with ability of mysql regexp , we can search for a value simply.
see:
*****S{number}[fieldname];S{number}[value];*****
searching for a pattern in this field can solve our problem,. also for preventing probably confilicts we can addslash values before submiting them to engine of ETC class.
i mean that calss of etc when wants to insert a value in db, first fetch its current value, unserialize it, add value(***but addslashed***),serialize it, insert it in db.
when wana to search for a value in a field , creats a regexp pattern as i described above , and use it into sql query. joined queries also possible.
mjaor problem , btw is deleting fields, that is a time-consumer process.
whats your idea?
The thing is - any solution we come up with needs to be supported by several different database layers (which we plan to introduce). We can't add non standard SQL in to the queries because of this. (Such as the REGEXP function with MySQL)
Tell me what you don't like with adding a new column to the tables and I'll see what I can do about improving it.
Chris