Custom Fields for a Form representing an object

Question

I have an architectural question concerning custom fields in a view for an object. Let's say you have a User Object with some basic information like firstname, lastname, ... that can be used by all customers.

Now, often we get a question from a customer to add couple of custom fields typical for their domain. Our solution now is an xml data column where key value pairs are stored. This has been ok so far, but now we'll have to find a more architectural solution.

For instance, now, a customer wants a dropdown where it can select the value for its custom field. We could still store the selected value in the xml data column, but where do we store all those dropdown values...

I know that in sharepoint you can also add custom fields like dropdowns and I was wondering how to deal with this best. I want to avoid creating custom tables for customers, or having a table with 90 columns (10 basic and then 10 for each customer), ...

You get the idea, it should be generic and be able to deal with all sorts of problems in the future.

What I was thinking about is a Table UserConfiguration where each record has a Foreign Key to the Customer (Channel in our database), then a column FieldName, a column FieldType and a column Values. The column values should be an xml type column, because for a dropdown, we'll need to add multiple values. Also, each value can have extra data attached to it (not just a name). The other problem then is how to store the selected value. I don't like the idea of having foreign keys to xml in my database (read somewhere that Azure can't handle this all to well). Do you just store the name of the value (what if the value were to disappear out of the xml?)?

Any documentation, links on this kind of problems would also be great. I'm trying to find a design pattern that deals with this kind of problem in the database.

Answer 1

I want to answer your question in two parts:
1) Implementing custom fields in a database server
2) Restricting custom fields to an enumeration of values

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Although common solutions to 1) are discussed in the question referenced by @Simon, maybe you are looking for a bit of discussion on what the problem is and why it hasn't been solved for us already.

• databases are great for structured, typed data
• custom fields are inherently less structured
• therefore, custom fields are more difficult to work with in a database
• some or many of the advantages of using a database are lost
  • some queries may be more difficult or impossible
  • type safety may be lost (in the database)
  • data integrity may no longer be enforced (by the database)
  • it's a lot more work for the implementers and maintainers

As discussed in the other question, there's no perfect solution.
But these benefits/features still need to be implemented somewhere, and so often the application becomes responsible for data integrity and type safety.
For situations like these, people have created Object-Relation Mapping tools, although, as Jeff Atwood says, even using an ORM could create more problems than it solved. However, you mentioned that it 'should be generic and be able to deal with all sorts of problems in the future' -- this makes me think an ORM might be your best bet.

So, to sum up my answer, this is a known problem with known solutions, none of which are completely satisfactory (because it's so hard). Pick your poison.

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To answer the second part of (what I think is) your question:
As mentioned in the linked question, you could implement Entity-Attribute-Value in your database for custom fields, and then add an extra table to hold the legal values for each entity. Then, the attribute/value of the EAV table is a foreign key into the attribute-value table.

For example,

CREATE TABLE `attribute_value` ( -- enumerations go in this table
    `attribute` varchar(30), 
    `value` varchar(30), 
    PRIMARY KEY (`attribute`, `value`)
);

CREATE TABLE `eav` ( -- now the values of attributes are restricted
    `entityid` int, 
    `attribute` varchar(30), 
    `value` varchar(30), 
    PRIMARY KEY (`entityid`, `attribute`), 
    FOREIGN KEY (`attribute`, `value`) REFERENCES `attribute_value`(`attribute`, `value`)
);

Of course, this solution isn't perfect or complete -- it's only supposed to illustrate the idea. For instance, it uses varchars, and lacks a type column. Also, who gets to decide what the possible values for each attribute are? Can these be changed at any time by the user?