Storing series of related strings.

[Vorotaev]

I'm trying to write a simple membership system, and for security's sake, I'd like to track the various IP addresses used to access a given account. I obviously don't know what the IP addresses will be in advance, nor do I know how many of them will be used for an account. If the person uses dial-up, it could change with every single visit.

If I knew there would be only one IP address, the situation would be simple; each row would contain a member's screenname, their miscellaneous information, and their IP address all bundled together nice and simple like. But since each member may need to store many IP addresses, I need something a bit more flexible.

MySQL doesn't seem to have any kind of array data type. The closest thing I could find was LONGTEXT, which I could then use to produce a series of IP addresses in CSV format, which I in turn could use a PHP function like explode() to break into an array to work with. It seems like there should be a better way to handle it though.

Any suggestions or information would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[obsidian]

your best bet, since you're using a relational database would be to build a related table to store the IPs in. for instance, you'd simply need a table with 2 columns: user_id and ip_address. then, when they log in, you simply check to see whether or not that IP address is stored in relation to that user or not. if so, leave it be; if not, record it.

[Vorotaev]

Ah, that sounds perfect. Thanks very much for your help. ^_^

[fenway]

And you could even get away with a UNIQUE index on ip_address and then just run INSERT INGOREs.

[wickning1]

Not if two users log in from the same IP (public machine, dynamic IP, etc). Could certainly UNIQUE on user_id,ip_address though.

[fenway]

Yeah, that's what I meant.