Best practice question in the event a user selects multiple itmes from a category lis

Databases
1

Hello,

I wrote a small script that basically displays 20 to 30 categories on a page which a user has the option toeither select one or multiple items from the list. For the sack of argument the user selected the following items from the list:

Table-> tbl_category : ‘Green car’, ‘truck’, ‘Van’, ‘minivan’,’ laptop’, ‘iPhone’, ‘great value mixed nuts 80% peanuts’, ‘cup’

Tables I have:
Table-> tbl_user
Table-> tbl_category

What is the best practice in terms of saving the multiple selection:

1.Do I create a field in tbl_user and save the selection or selections into that one field?
2. Create a separate tbl_saveCategoreySelection and save them as individual records and link it to tbl_user?

At the same time the saved category list will need to be searchable.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

2

option 2 :slight_smile:

3

would going with option number 2 would create a lot of repetitive entries. yes for different users but the table still would hlod repetitive info.

4

don’t worry about it

imagine a table containing people’s addresses – there’s a column for country, right? and many people would have ‘CA’ or ‘US’ as their country, right? is this repetitive? i suppose, but there’s no way you’d want to try to avoid this

same with your user categories… sure, multiple users might select the same category, but there’s no way you’d want to try to avoid this