profile_fields and profile_values tables

By sbrenner on 19 Feb 2007 at 03:37 UTC

I've setup some user profile fields and they seem to function correctly in that they show up when you enter or edit your account profile info. The problem is that they are being stored en masse in the data field in the users table. That is a messy way to access that data. I would have thought they would be stored in the profile_values table which could be accessed via sql much easier. Did I forget some setting in the drupal setup?

Thanks,

Steve

Comments

I think I've read somewhere

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 19 February 2007 at 03:51

I think I've read somewhere that it is designed that way. There is someone working on a replacement for Profile (I'm sure it will show up in a search). I would suggest posting your requirements on that thread.

Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far

NancyDru

I found the problem

sbrenner commented 19 February 2007 at 03:58

I disengaged the connection with the smf forum module and the data is now showing up
in the profile_values table.

Any idea what will be done with the replacement for the profile?

Thanks,

Steve

Here's the link

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 19 February 2007 at 17:30

http://drupal.org/node/51057

Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far

NancyDru

I'm running Drupal 5 with

revival commented 25 February 2007 at 19:27

I'm running Drupal 5 with only a few 'standard' modules, but still am getting the values stored in the users table.

Any idea what causes the values to be stored in users rather than profile_values?

These are the additional modules I am running:

Project Issue
Project Issue Tracking
AdSense
Amazon Associates
Invite
Pathauto
Release Monitor
Weather

although I may have installed other modules & uninstalled them in the past...

I'm having the same issue

jwenning commented 21 March 2007 at 02:48

If I create new profile fields that are public to the user they end up in profile_values, otherwise they end up in users.data. What's even worse, is that if I switch the profile field from public to private, it doesn't clean up after itself meaning that from then on it stores the new profile field in users.data but data entered prior to me changing it still exists in the profile_values table. IMHO, both implementations need serious improvement. I am trying to sort data by profile values, think about the code you have to write to sort by a users country or age! It's difficult but possible to sort from profile_values using code like: "MAX(CASE WHEN profile_values.fid = 9 THEN value ELSE NULL END) AS country" but nearly impossible to sort data from multiple users.data fields. It would be much better to combine profile_fields table with profile_values table even though the db would not be as normalized, the data would be easier to work with. This feature has been driving me nuts as I have to do serious code gymnastics to search and sort data.