...

} This method fails dismally. It would be very non-portable between versions of PMA, and additionally, how do you handle multi-dimensonal data without adding more rows?

of course this was a simple example, of course this would not work as simple as that. But you do not add more rows, you add more tables.

A configuration file might have two or three servers, each with a number of IP Allow/Deny rules.

Effectively, we have array nesting 3 levels deep already with this, so giving each variable a field in the table is not practical.

why not? a new level of the array only means a new foreign_table

Additionally, my method using XML + XPath allows the administrator of each copy of PMA to completely customize what the user is allowed to change, with only a single line in the configuration file. (This is one of those security preferences that is not available in the DB-Config level).

<snip />

Let me finish coding it up the way I have in mind, with the customizability and view towards the future, and then tell me if you can port all of those features to PHP3 without XPath. That XPath

hmm well i am still not convinced that what we have here is a problem so new and so complex that it cannot be resolved with normal methods. each groupware application like phprojekt or phpgroupware will have had at least the same complexities to deal with. And i do think that when you have three levels of the array you don't serialize or xml it to try to put it in one cell of one table but you simply use three normalized tables. but obviously this has been discussed here before (allthough i couldn't find it searching the mailinglistarchive) and i am not even one of the developers so don't worry ´bout me, i am sure your code will work nice as well, and i'll be glad to see all those features when i finally decide to update all my servers to 4.2. Regards Mike