A friend of mine was tweeting about how he found a drop down control in some application he’s working on that binds on a (“lookup”) table with only the 2 rows for male & female.. Check the short conversation on twitter.
In my humble opinion -as weird it may sound- this approach (for similar, small lookups) might makes sense, in some way. Not exactly as is, may be it will make sense more if it’s within a lookup module (a single table for all lookups where every entry has a lookup type).
Other “regular” approaches (& their expected problems) :
People usually tackle such small lookups using enums, or just using an “agreed on” key/value pairs convention (not stores anywhere in code or DB, may be only a code comment here or there) which usually tend to get forgotten & you have to trace code to know which key stands for each lookup value..
Even worse, is using a boolean for such
Benefits of a DB Table approach:
Other than the benefits of avoiding the above, using DB to explicitly state lookup values, is that they are more dynamic, ie: you can always edit them without touching much code, that would be handy in cases like:
- Clients constantly changing small stuff like spelling, etc
- Adding other functionalities/features, like multilingual support for eg..
Thus, I find avoiding enums, etc & using tables even for small stuff like that gender much more convenient..
Let me know what you think about it, & (hopefully) suggest a better approach..
