Why use special separator for enum/set columns?

S

Shane Robinson

Guest
After a little bit of testing (since my other question went unanswered) I found why one has to use DaDaBIK to enter records that contain columns with multiple values. DaDaBIK actually inserts the separators along with the real values and then strips them out for subsequent displays and updates.

My question now is why?

phpmyadmin allows a multiple select when you specify a column type of ENUM or SET and stores it properly as a comma delimited value. According to mySQL documentation, multiple SET column values are stored delimited by commas. Naturally, this means you can not have commas in your set values but this is rarely a problem.

But DaDaBIK requires multple value columns have special value separators (~ by default) which causes problems and additional work when displaying the values in another application or simply on a web page.

Plus, often times in real world situations when content originates from many different sources (other databases, text files, Excel files, etc.) and/or must be exported to many different formats, these special separators on ENUM/SET columns really screws things up.

DaDaBIK is great except for this one thing that basically makes it unusable in situations where DaDaBIK is not the sole application managing and displaying the records.

Is there an update in the works to change this?

Thanks in advance.

-shane robinson
 
E

Eugenio

Guest
Shane Robinson wrote:

> After a little bit of testing (since my other question went
> unanswered) I found why one has to use DaDaBIK to enter records
> that contain columns with multiple values. DaDaBIK actually
> inserts the separators along with the real values and then
> strips them out for subsequent displays and updates.
>
> My question now is why?

Hi,
at the moment I'm not planning to change this behaviour, even if, you are right, under certain circumstances could be a problem.
But I want to be free to change my separator when I want (and insert also values containing a comma) and I prefer to have a software that could be ported easily on other DBMS.

Eugenio.

(Latest version of DaDaBIK when this message was posted: 2.2.1)
 
Top