Comment by techiferous
9 years ago
You're assuming all the questions are being presented to the user at once. Imagine a UI that presents questions to a user one-by-one. If the user bails out of the survey early, the rest of the survey answers can be null.
In that case you can easily keep track of what step they got up to in the wizard. It's a different way to store the data, but would work just as well.
I think the null vs empty argument works better when there are 40 boxes on screen at once. But again I'm not sure what semantic difference you'd find between 'they left it empty' and 'they never clicked into it'.
Keeping track of the step works until you move a field onto a different step in the wizard.
First, it's a document store so you can store the way the form is constructed with it (i.e. order of elements, etc).
Second, in Dynamo you could chose the absence of a key to represent "never got here" and a key with a null value to represent "they left this blank". You don't need an empty string.
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