By Deterius on

Okay, this is an issue I have with extending profile information;

If I include new fields in the profile section it just adds them to the "user" table in the datase and just sticks them all in to the "data" column.

I have an issue with that;
-isn't the basic rule of database management that extended user profile information be in a seperate table than their username and password.
- and dosent it slow down the database?
- And finnaly when i have a bunch of users I want to import in to the database, with extended profiles, I can't do it, beacause (as stated above) the extended profile information is all in one column. [Ex: the way my other database is; each descripition of the profile Ex: School, Country, Address etc.. has its own column]

Does anyone think this is in an issue, and how did you guys work around it?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

WhatTheFawk’s picture

WhatTheFawk commented

I also don't like this, but couldn't you make your own relational database table with the users info then just call that based on their ID or something. Either way heres a list of modules that might help, some are in development still, but the creator is very active, they work and they're almost done, so you want:

UserNode - http://drupal.org/project/usernode
NodeFamily - http://drupal.org/project/nodefamily
NodeProfile - http://drupal.org/project/nodeprofile

UserNode turns users into nodes allowing you to do things like CCK and Taxonomy on them which basically extends the profile. I think the database schema of that would work for you if you needed to bring some current users tables over.

NodeFamily relates nodes to each other and is needed for NodeProfile which gives a new node that acts as a users profile and can also store info, so you could move your users profile info to UserNode or NodeProfile's database table.

I can't check the layout of the database for those modules at work but try installing them to see if the database schema is more to your liking.

If you decide to use all that and Views, then you probably also want:

Views Fusion - http://drupal.org/project/views_fusion

It will fuse views together allowing them to share info. This way you can list the users Profile info with their NodeProfile info attached in a single view, then you can sort users or filter them, or anything else possible with views.