Array to find providers based on Answers to Qs

[simonmlewis]

Hi there

I'm a little bit rusty these days with My-SQL so hoping I can be led into a good route for this.

We have been asked to do a website where people can answer questions (from dropdown answers), and the result will bring up a list of providers for language support.

So if you answer Yes to "can you write a letter in English", then it will find all those providers who have stated whether they can support that.

So far these are my tables

Add question to db-Questions
id
question

Add answers to db-Answers
id
Qid
answer
ProvideId (array)

Add providers to db-Providers
id
contact name
company
address1
address2
town
county
postcode

My difficulty is how to assign providers to the answers. ie. if an answers means providers 1, 3 and 7 need to be selected, how do I do that?

Would it go into a ProviderIDs field, as 1,3,7 using an array, and then 'explode' it in a query?

How would I go about doing that? 4 years ago I could have figured it out but am a little rusty!

Thanks.

[Christopher]

You could put "1,3,7" in the ProvideId field, or create a forth Answers_Providers table that has AnswerId and ProviderId fields.