Hello Imar,

I had a question for you, that is out of the scope of the book.

After reading the book, I realized I am interested in developing a tool which serves as an inventory management tool. That said, I want it to be dynamic in nature. Essentially I want users to be able to sign up (using the controls you present in the book) and from there I would like for them to be able to store inventory information by essentially defining what attributes they want store.

Now, even if I will be the one asking them information about what info they would like to store, I want it to be dynamic in nature so you could do it directly via the browser rather than in a development environment. That said, after having the knowledge gained from reading your book could you suggest what else I would need to learn to go about tackling this task?

In case what I said above is not clear, let me present an example of what I am asking from an end-product perspective.

You log on to the site, and you are presented with the log-on screen. Lets say you already have an account, so you log in. Since this is your first time logging in, you are presented with options that allow you to define fields for recording information related to your inventory (InventoryID, ProductType, ProductCost, IN/OUT, etc) from here it will also allow you to select the data-type these will be stored as within the DB. Now without getting deeper into this in a situation like this where you could have multiple users storing a lot of different type of information how would you go about creating a new DB for each user? Or would it serve your purpose better to just have a single DB and store all of their info as specific attributes? But if this is the case would you create a table per user?

Thanks, please let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of this.

Hi there,

This is not as easy as it sounds and indeed, you have a number of different choices.

First question is: do you really need this flexible design? Maybe there are other ways to accomplish the same thing?

If you really need it, you can choose among a number of techniques:

1. Create tables or columns on the fly for each application. Using DDL statements you can create them at run-time.

2. Store data in a few tables and assign a type to each value.

3. Store data in XML in the database so you can still query it in SQL.

For some ideas about implementing option two, take a look here: http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/082008-1.aspx

Cheers,

Imar

__________________
Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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