How to store custom data into a user

Question

I need some direction in how to store (complex) data into users (best practice)

I'm working on a project for a fitness app. I created a structure with 2 levels for workouts where level 1 entries are skills and level 2 entries progressions for these skills, in the progressions I made a matrix containing a content field for an exercise, a table for data such as sets and reps and some practical information.

Now here is how it should work:

The user starts a workout, a workout contains 4 or more exercises to complete for the workout to be finished. Now when every set of an exercise is done, the user has to fill in a number of repetitions he/she did for every set. When the workout finishes I would like to save all this data in the user (Or should i make a section for this?)

The data looks something like this:

    "skillID": {
      "set1":"rep1"
      "set2":"rep2"
    }, etc

This data is important, the next time this user is logging in and starting a workout I want to retrieve this data to give the user overview of how he/she is progressing, so like comparing the workout data with the user data. Plus it should be some kind of history too. Here it gets a bit to complicated for me, but I want to learn this! My thoughts were this:

Option 1: I create a section, here I create user data entries (so they are related with the user who create them) I store the data somehow on these entries, with tables or something Option 2: I store 2 JSON models into the user (if possible), 1 for writing and overwriting the progress of each workout (when doing the same workout it overwrites the existing data) and 1 for the history, were every date of doing a workout is a key and the value is the whole workout data provided by the users input.

What is the best way to go?

Answer 1

There are a whole bunch of ways to do what you want to do.

You can add custom fields to user accounts. If you wanted to go with option 2 then you could create a custom text field and write the JSON into that.

Another way would be to add a Matrix field to the user accounts and write a new row for each workout.

And another way would be to create a new channel for Workouts. When a user completes a workout, a new entry is created and related to them. You can then retrieve entries relating to that user to display their workout history.

And yet another way, would be to create a custom model for a Workout and relate it to the user account. Your plugin would then create records using that model and you could retrieve them to display the user's progress.

Answer 2

I'm in a VERY similar situation .... my reputation is too low to comment so had to add as answer - I hope that isn't a problem.

Our system interacts with a 3rd party web app. Records are created in the 3rd party app and we need to keep references to them in Craft. Each record is tied to a USER. For each record we need to store the relevant recordId and JSON data in Craft. There will be 100+ records for each user and each record will contain roughly 50KB of data.

I'm debating which of the following suggestions from foamcow's answer is better. Specifically I was debating:

1) store in matrix field: create a matrix field (two fields = recordId; json) and assign this to the user; create a new 'block' each time a new record needs to be store;

vs.

2) store in Entries create a new Entry (section type = Channel?); create a new entry each time a record needs to be stored