Hi,
I am in the planning stages of a multi-language web-content & user management system. I may not be here to support this app forever so priority is on maintainability, scalability (pref. by less experienced programmers or laymen) We have a bunch of questionnaire type pages (name, address, sex, tv watching habits, salary etc.) that are populated dynamically based on database and xml (more below) Users fill out these pages, and that information is stored I want to store the information for these pages (i.e. the available options for salary, the question-text for the salary question) in a mysql database BUT this site is multilingual so options etc. will need to be stored for English, French (with room for future languages as well). I would also like congruity between language, i.e. if you pick "Engineer" occupation type in French or English, I want your user record to have the same code (i.e. whether picked Manager(En) or Gerant(Manager in French), the user's occupation should=5 (the code for Engineer/Gerant) Obviously this poses a problem for 'normal' relational-databases as one record can have one ID and I don't think having a FrenchName & EnglishName for each would be that efficient. My partner has suggested not using a traditional database but a combination of mySQL and XML. The mySQL would basically store user records, with codes for most options (i.e. Occupation would = a number from 1 to 20, salary would = a number from 1 - 5 (representing a salary range), while the XML would store the meaning of these codes (i.e. we would run an sql query to get the number 5, then run that past the xml to get the named value (i.e. Engineer) for it. Similarly for the Web Content management, we'd store most of it in XML. I hope this post makes sense to you. My general preference is to stick to a normal relational database. Which is the better approach, a big database or the dbase/xml version. Ben
