Checkboxes and MySQL

[frikus]

What is the best way to store product features similar to those in the screen-shot?

 

A user must be able to search for products by these features too:

 

 

[fenway]

This is a classical name/value pair example -- I assume the categories and subcategories are "real" -- i.e. have UIDs to records in tables somewhere.

[frikus]

???

fenway, can you give me more details on this classical example ?

[fenway]

Where are these values coming from?

[frikus]

These values are coming from a user posting an online car ad.

On 'Build Your Ad' page users can check all the corresponding checkboxes, so the list of available features will show up in the ad.

Something like this:

 

'Features: Air Conditioning, Driver Side Air Bag, Passenger Side Air Bag, Anti-Lock Brakes, AM/FM Radio, Security Features, Alloy Wheels, All Wheel Drive, Bucket Seats, Center Arm..'

 

Other users can do advanced search for cars by these features - they select Make, Model, Year and check the checkboxes with the features they want.

 

I assume that i need a separate row for each car feature in the main 'car_ads' table.

The simplified version of this table can look like this:

 

idmakemodelyearair_bagspower_windowscd_changer

12307DodgeNeon2003

1

0

0

12407BmwX52004

1

1

1

12507DaewooLanos2001

0

0

0

 

But by building the table this way I will end up with too many rows, because there are so many features in modern cars.

Is there a better way to accomplish this or having many rows in a table is ok?

 

 

[fenway]

So they're not currently represented in the db?