Design Advice for Lookup Lists

DMSpurlock · April 1, 2020, 7:27pm

I have a table that holds statuses for all drop downs for the accounting application. The table has a TableName Column and ColumnName column that combine to make the list of values with their display text values. I was trying to figure out what you might think the best design for this would be. A single base class that would maybe use convertto to get them to the actual list? I am really looking for what might be the best / least coding paradigm for this.

Any suggestions?

Dere

mythz · April 2, 2020, 3:45am

That’s really a question for StackOverflow, there is no best design covering all use-cases, it’s always going to be highly dependent on your use-case. If the lists don’t change often you can use Enums, they’re used a lot in TechStacks, e.g:

github.com

NetCoreApps/TechStacks/blob/3b1c85398c03293bbae0675257e33f847a35da77/src/TechStacks.ServiceInterface/TechnologyStackServices.cs#L327-L356


public static List<Option> GetAllTiers()
{
    return Enum.GetValues(typeof(TechnologyTier)).Map(x =>
        new Option
        {
            Name = x.ToString(),
            Title = typeof(TechnologyTier).GetMember(x.ToString())[0].GetDescription(),
            Value = (TechnologyTier)x,
        });
}


public static List<Option> GetAllPostTypes()
{
    return Enum.GetValues(typeof(PostType)).Map(x =>
        new Option
        {
            Name = x.ToString(),
            Title = typeof(PostType).GetMember(x.ToString())[0].GetDescription(),
        });
}

This file has been truncated. show original

Where you can use the [Description] attribute to provide the display name that’s different to the internal codename that’s stored in your DB.

The standard way in an RDBMS is to use a code table with int / string ids where you’ll be able to apply constraints to ensure referential integrity. If you have lots of code tables you can use a single table with all multiple lists which will make it easier to build a single UI to manage them all at the cost of being able to enforce referential integrity.

So there is no best, but I have no idea where or why you’d use a base class for this, can’t think of where it would be used in any of the above options and what value it would provide.