I have a FreeMember based registration form where I want to record a users areas of interest at time of registration and also provide a mechanism to edit those interests after registration through a profile edit screen.
The areas of interest are ExpressionEngine categories so I can easily pull them out and display them as a list of checkboxes on the registration and profile edit screens. My question is two fold...
1) How should I approach storing this data in a custom member profile field? Ideally I want this to remain flexible so I’m envisaging storing the data as a a pipe delimited string of category_ids or a JSONified array.
2) How am I best off processing the data, maybe using a bespoke extension for FreeMember or using jQuery to process the checkbox states on click and process that data and stuff it into a hidden field, then do the reverse on page load.
Thoughts much appreciated!