Is there any other way to store values in DB other than 'system_settings_form'?

Question

On change(using AJAX) of Job title the text area will show and admin will enter text in admin form. By using system_settings_form I am storing values in DB using Variables.

PROBLEM:

1. I have more than 20 values in the dropdown.
2. For this I need to store the textarea values in a variable.
3. This leads to huge values stored in variable table.

Is there any other way rather than using this, or is this the best way of using?

I am just checking all the possibilities.

Any Ideas will be much appreciated, Thanks.

Answer 1

You can store your data wherever you like, in whatever format you like, and you can manage it in any way that php allows; Drupal doesn't have an opinion on the matter.

If you're asking whether Drupal has another variable API you can use for this slightly different requirement, then no it doesn't.

So to answer your question directly

Is there any other way to store values in DB other than 'system_settings_form'

Yes, just use the database API in whatever way you think is appropriate for the data you're storing/retrieving. Various modules provide data layers, e.g. ctools has a data API as Jimmy mentioned in the comments. There's also the core entity API, but that's going to be overkill for your needs.

All that said, you might want to actually profile your code to see if 20 values serialised into a single row is going to cause you any real problems. Yours and MySQL's definition of "huge" might be quite different.