Somewhat OT but this is for a CF app and I thought it could be useful for others too.
I'm in the processing of making a very flexible OO inventory app. The basic rundown is this. You have a table in the DB called "Products". This is where you inventory goes. Now because this database is going to be used by several different e-commerce apps, it has to be flexible. App 1 may have a field called "MODEL" for the item data to go into the table. App2 might have a field called "YEAR", and etc. Now if I make new columns for every app, I'm going to end up with a products table with like 40 columns. Sure that will work, but its not very organized, and there are things like, one product cant have more than one model, and etc. Instead I want to store the data as XML in a text field. Pretty simple right? I format the data using cfwddx. This way I can easily format the data as it comes in and out of the database. It works great. But now I ran into a problem. What if I want to search by model? Say I want all the items in the database that are model "XYZ". Well the only option I have it to search the xml text field for XYZ, but then I "could" get double the number of fields I want if any other xml data has "XYZ" in it. Does anyone know of a good solution to this? Is there a way to search the specific xml fields while its still in the database? I've looked into the Microsoft OpenXML, but that seems overly complex. Any ideas would be great. Thanks, -Alan ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=t:4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4 Get the mailserver that powers this list at http://www.coolfusion.com
