How to handle an "Other" field properly (foreign keys, etc.)

[jherzog]

In my front end application I have a drop-down selection field called "customer status" with options like "Good","Suspended","Overdue","Lead" etc. These different options are stored in a table called "cust_status". The choice will be stored in a table called "customers". Typically I would store it as the foreign key from the cust_status table. However I have to have an "Other" field where you can enter in anything you want. So should I 1) have two fields in the "customers" table; one that stores the foreign key if a presented choice was chosen and a second to store the other value if that was entered. OR 2) one field, don't store the foreign key but store its actual value as a varchar. This way both the presented options and the random other text could be stored in the same field but you loose the dependency between the two tables.? Which would be a more proper way to handle this?

Thanks,

Jed

[longneck]

personally, i would go with the two field approach. i like having the enforced constraints on that type of field. but the other way is also perfectly acceptable in my opinion.

[r937]

i would also go with 2 columns

make sure that 'Other' is also one of the FKs

too bad MySQL doesn't (yet) support CHECK constraints, because you'd want one of those to make sure that if 'Other' was the chosen status, then the 'Other' column was not null, and vice versa