Form Builder storing results as WDDX

Question

A while back i wrote a form builder. To store the results of
a form submission I decided to use wddx and save the xml string
into the db, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Further
down the line this form builder has been used for much larger forms
and sheer amount of data being store as text is making the server
crash when it has to be serialized or deserialized.
I was wondering if there is a better way to store this data,
obviously storing the data in tables would be a bit of a pain as
the form builder is dynamic and can have any number of fields.
I decided against storing the wddx data in a text file as i
was worried about read/write locks on a busy form. Was i wrong to
go down this route?
Hope someone can help
Matt

Answer 1

cf_matt wrote:
> Ian
>
> yes i think thats right
>
> so i have:
>
> form_id | form_name | form_recordset
> 1 enquiries <WDDX>
>
> I did think about storing name and value pairs in a
table but then that would
> be huge amounts of records
>
First of all, don't be afraid of a huge amount of records.
That is what
databases are designed to deal with. A great many very smart
people
have spend a great many hours making database management
systems very
efficient at processing huge amounts of records for the past
fifty years
or so. Personally, I trust their work to be more complete
then anything
I can cobble together on my own.
Secondly, I would at least break it up so that each complete
form submit
is one record in the database. Then at least you are dealing
with a
constant sized WDDX packet, not one that is growing with
every new
record append to the data.