Hi,

I am using Server Side JavaScript - yes, I am actually using Server Side JavaScript. To complexify things even more, I use Oracle as a backend database (10g). With some crazy XSLT and mutant-like HTML generation, I can build really fancy web forms - yes, I am aware of Rails and other likewise frameworks and I choose the path of horror instead. I have no JQuery or other fancy framework at my disposal, just plain ol' JavaScript that should be supported by the underlying engine called Mozilla Rhino. Yes, it is insane and I love it.

So, I have a bunch of tables at my disposal and some of them are filled with associative keys that link to values. As I am a people pleaser, I want to add some nifty user-preference driven solutions.

My users have all an unique user_id and this user_id is available during the entire session.

My initial idea is to have a user preference table, where I have "three" columns: user_id, feature and pref_string. Using a delimiter, such as : or - (haven't thought about a suitable one yet), I could like store a bunch of preferences as a list and store its elements inside an array using the .split-method (similar like the PHP-explode function). The feature column could be like the table name or some identifier for the "feature" i want to link preferences too. I hate hardcoding objects, especially as I want to be able to back these up and reuse this functionality application-wide. Of course I would love better ideas, just keep in mind I cannot just add a library that easily.

These preferences could be like "joined" to the table, so I can query it and use its values.

I hope it doesn't sounds too complex, because well.. its basically something really simple I need.

Thanks!