[cgiapp] Before I go off into a codestorm... [Mini-CRM Question]

[Jason Purdy <suppressed>]

I wanted to survey the great crowd here & see if such a thing already 
exists before I launch into some code mayhem.

I've built a few subscription databases with fields like name, address, 
zip, opt-in preferences, etc.

Now my boss wants more "metadata" about people, like boolean flags 
(affiliate, open shop), text fields and I suppose datestamps, too. 
He'll also want searching capabilities, etc.

So instead of widening the "people" table to support these fields (and 
having to alter the table every time), I'm thinking of developing a 
datapoint type of system, where you'd have one table of datapoints:

Table datapoints:
 - id
 - label     (text label)
 - data_type (bool, text, int, timestamp)

Then several join tables, based on datatypes:

Table text_datapoints
 - datapoint_id  (foreign key, from the "datapoints" table)
 - people_id	 (foreign key, from the "people" table)
 - value         (text value)

Table bool_datapoints
 - datapoint_id  (foreign key, from the "datapoints" table)
 - people_id	 (foreign key, from the "people" table)
 - value         (bool value)

[etc...]

Ok, so after all the database stuff, I'd have to build web interfaces to 
allow the boss to manage the datapoints and also have a "power search" 
(getting some inspiration from Thunderbird's "Search Messages" 
functionality).

Soooo ... has this type of thing been done before and/or already 
available?  It's kinda like "CRM", but not as complex as something 
Siebel would sell me. ;)  I would envision having this package in a 
bundle that folks could bind to a database table.

Thanks!

Jason

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