User-Defined Items

[ssteinke]

Any ideas on how to set up my tables to allow a user to define the stuff he might need to keep track of... I searched the forum and did not see an answer. This is my thought, if I have a Contacts database and the user want's to keep track of the Hire Date for example, how would a user define a field to data type 'Date' when another user may want to keep track of a Yes/No field for some other piece of info. I wanted to allow some flexibility in case the end-user sees a need for data I did not provide a place for.

tblContact
ContactID PK
LName
FName

tblUserDefinedItems
ItemID PK
Item
Type (i.e.boolean, date, text, etc...)

tjxContactItem
ContactID fk
ItemID fk
Value1 (bln)
Value2 (dte)
Value3 (txt)

This is what I have come up with, but it sure doesn't look or 'feel' right... I suppose I could just keep one field and only allow string entry's, I'm open to suggestions, any thoughts?