I am working on an application which will require one or more additional fields to be added to a table in order to track user defined information. This additional info is only used for reporting purposes(Crystal Reports), and will have no effect on the behavior of the application. The data for this field is populated from an outside application.
What would be the best way to handle this additional information? Here are some options based off of other SO answers:
- Entity-Attribute-Value (would this be overkill? Seems like there are many critics of EAV)
- Add additional column to table (not sure how Entity Framework would like this)
- Create a new Table for each UDF and use primary of parent table to link
If I understand the requirement correctly, you will need a datapoint to save information that would come from an external application and its structure is undefined at design time. if that is correct, then I would suggest using an xml datatype. by choosing this, you will not need to redesign your database in future when new key value pairs are inserted. Crystal reports should be easily able to include an xsl for this column.
Hope this help and good luck