# Manage of dynamic tables

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/manage-of-dynamic-tables/104586>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 20, 2007, 12:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/manage-of-dynamic-tables/104586 "2007-05-20T00:52:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Neshumah)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 12:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/manage-of-dynamic-tables/104586/1 "2007-05-20T00:52:35Z")

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Hi group,

Im new at here and I hope someone could give me a hand, im building an  
app witch is going to manage big amount of contacts, but my problem is  
that I need to accept a variety of columns from my customers, so i was  
planning to do this:

Have a table named Lists on witch I would manage some other tables  
that I would built dynamically respecting the user data, so if an user  
want to upload a csv with 6 columns, I create a table with arbitrary  
random name with 6 columns plus my control columns.  
So schema looks like:

Lists \> id, company\_id, name, table\_name (this would be my dynamically  
created table name)

My dynamic tables would have, I already have a datatype parser for  
colums data type definition.  
Table# \> id, email, creation\_date, column1, column2, column3…  
columnN

My problem with this schema is that I don’t know how to manage  
dynamically created tables. If you could give me a hand or some  
ideas, I appreciate it.

Thanks very much

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**Author:** ![Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Neshumah)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 1:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/manage-of-dynamic-tables/104586/2 "2007-05-20T01:54:40Z")

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Or maybe some other way to get this done ?  
Thanks very much

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**Author:** ![Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Neshumah](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Neshumah)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 5:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/manage-of-dynamic-tables/104586/3 "2007-05-20T17:03:36Z")

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Neshumah wrote:

> Or maybe some other way to get this done ?  
> Thanks very much

To be honest I do not see the value of this is the way you explain, why  
not create a table for all contacts, where you have a lot of different  
fields, for all the contacts, so that you will have several values in  
your table which are not filled out.  
If you want to have a variable number of phonenumbers, emails or  
webpages, then you could consider setting up another table with a 1 to n  
relationship…

Hope this helps,

Branko