Ask HN: Difficult Form Problem | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Difficult Form Problem

1 pointAeiper5 comments

On Facebook, when you make a question, users can make their own answer to the poll. I was wondering how to do exactly that. How do I make a poll where users can make their own option?

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What are you having trouble with? The html? The backend? Something else?

I do not know anything at all about how to do this or start it.

Would you know how to do this if poll respondents weren't allowed to add their own answers?

Yes

So you add an extra radio button at the bottom of the form, with an <input type=text> instead of a <label>. You will want some javascript to select the bottom radio button when the text control receives focus.

Then on the backend, if the extra radio button was selected, instead of incrementing the vote count for that answer, you create a new answer in the database with a vote count of 1.

I assume you have your answers stored in a table like the following (pseudo-sql, my sql is rusty):

  CREATE TABLE answers (
    question_id          INTEGER NOT NULL,
    answer_id            INTEGER NOT NULL,
    answer_total_votes   INTEGER DEFAULT 1,
    answer_text          TEXT NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (question_id, answer_id)
  )

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