Clyatt: SirLagz: Sooner or later some new car will be introduced with some items that don’t fit into your list and then you will have to ALTER the table to add more columns and end with lot of empty columns.

Clyatt: SirLagz: Which headlights? :

Stoakley: Salle: “headlights” is pretty broad 😀

Clyatt: SirLagz: Exactly. With some cars it is single detail, with others 2 or even 3

Brdar: Salle: 2 or 3 headlights? or am I misunderstanding?

Nugent: I’ve got 4 headlights on the front of my car.

Nugent: My brother’s car has three pairs.

Clyatt: SirLagz: Take Nissan Juke for example. Which piece in the front counts as headlight?

Beljan: Salle: sorry, I’m knackered, trying to finish what’s left on this thing that I’m building

Smalt: Salle: I don’t think the people doing the checklist care.as long as light comes from the front of the car haha

Clyatt: SirLagz: I would always put item1, item2, item3 . in separate table you know

Clyatt: SirLagz: You never know what and when will be made mandatory by some law or something

Bynam: Salle: oh this checklist is a very informal checklist for a competition that my friend helps run

Cunneen: Salle: and the cars that are in this competition very rarely comply with the law 😛

Clyatt: SirLagz: That’s true, but often they have to comply with much more stringent rules :

Zilliox: Salle: that’s also true, but up to the scrutineers to determine.they just use this form that I’m building to say ‘check headlights’ or not

Clyatt: SirLagz: Anyway. Even if you always set all the items you definitely should not put item_comments in the same table. That’s obvious mistake

Eby: Salle: yeah I realised that as I looked at the table just then

Clyatt: SirLagz: I know that feeling when writing something after 30 consecutive work hours and later after good sleep wondering “How could I possibly write this?”

Hanle: Salle: haha yeah.I wrote most of this on Friday night, then just sat down just then to finish it off and thought “oh god.why did I make that table like that”

Nugent: It’d be useful exercise

Nugent: You’d get a much better feeling for what a good design “feels” like

Bracero: Nugent: I had a bad feeling about design when I sat down and looked at the table again 😛

Nugent: At the moment this table contains information about cars, information about answers to questions about those cars, and possibly information containing comments about those questions

Scheiderer: Nugent: yeah, should’ve been in 3 different tables really

Nugent: So with a bit of thought, you might decide the best design is a table identifying cars, a table identifying questions, and a table linking answers and/or comments to each {car/question} composite

Dewitt: Nugent: yep, that’s how I thought I should’ve done it too

Nugent: Or there might be a fourth table for comments, depending on the relationship of comments to questions or are the comments on cars?

Sleaford: Nugent: comments are on the question that would be linked to a car

Nugent: Right, so each {car/question} answer consists of two things: a yes/no, and a comment

Nugent: Ok, so three tables might work

Nugent: But as you’re doing it, consider carefully whether each column is about a car, a question, or a question about a car or some other combination

Megrabyan: Nugent: when you say question.do you mean the actual question? or the answer to the question?

Nugent: That’s the whole idea behind “key dependencies”: each datum depends on a “key” identifier for a thing, be that thing a car or question or question-for-a-car

Nugent: In this context I mean the thing you’ve got numbered, so “item 44” or “item 44 comment”

Nugent: I presume you’ve something written somewhere that says “44 = all wheel nuts fitted”

Nieto: Nugent: sorta.I’ve just hard coded the questions in the HTML because I’ve been told it’s not goign to change.so really the database has the answer to the question