I&#39;m asked to give users an option to choose all areas and routes in a select box 
How to design database for this purpose ?
How I can handle foreign-key based relations if I store this as a record ? 
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<td>id</td><td>name</td><td>area_id</td><td>country_id</td></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>0</td><td>all</td><td>null</td><td>null</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>1</td><td>Route 1</td><td>12</td><td>10</td></tr>
<tr>
<td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<pre><code>&lt;select name="routes" &gt;
 &lt;option value="0"&gt;All&lt;/option&gt;
 &lt;option value="1"&gt;Route 1&lt;/option&gt;
 &lt;option value="2"&gt;Route 2&lt;/option&gt;
 ..
 ..
&lt;/select&gt;
</code></pre><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/hashnode/image/upload/w_800/v1506675665/o3j18ukxxwsxrmeg4jwy.png" alt="">

I'm asked to give users an option to choose all areas and routes in a select box 

How to design database for this purpose ?

How I can handle foreign-key based relations if I store this as a record ? 

| id | name | area_id | country_id |
| -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- |
| 0 | all | null | null |
| 1 | Route 1 | 12 | 10 |
| | | | |

```
<select name="routes" >
 <option value="0">All</option>
 <option value="1">Route 1</option>
 <option value="2">Route 2</option>
 ..
 ..
</select>
```

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/hashnode/image/upload/w_800/v1506675665/o3j18ukxxwsxrmeg4jwy.png)

Can you attach screenshot of the UI or describe specific use case in details? What main entities/tables/models do you have, what is a process flow and goal, how those selected options are used later?
There is, usually, no &quot;all&quot; in DB, it is only presentation in UI meaning selecting multiple options at a time, like normal multiple select and you just store it as any one to many relationship in an array/json column or in another table.

Can you attach screenshot of the UI or describe specific use case in details? What main entities/tables/models do you have, what is a process flow and goal, how those selected options are used later?

There is, usually, no "all" in DB, it is only presentation in UI meaning selecting multiple options at a time, like normal multiple select and you just store it as any one to many relationship in an array/json column or in another table.


Quick question: Is the &quot;all&quot; option a search filter? Or is &quot;all&quot; being saved to the DB as a preference of the user? Is the Area an optional field or a compulsory field? Can you give a brief (one-line) business case behind this feature? Will be much easier to help you out.

Quick question: Is the "all" option a search filter? Or is "all" being saved to the DB as a preference of the user? Is the Area an optional field or a compulsory field? Can you give a brief (one-line) business case behind this feature? Will be much easier to help you out. 


How to handle choose all options in a select box on back-end?

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