In my records table I used to have the full text of the label in each row, but I ended up with small typos in label names that ended up screwing things up. So I separated the labels out into their own table and added a foreign key to link the two tables. In my records admin instead of having a text field for the label I used a drop-down that was populated from the labels table. But this caused more problems than it solved, because it greatly complicated the code for searching records, updating records, and I had to write extra methods to add new labels to the labels table.

So I decided to get rid of the extra table and just put the full text back into the records table. I kept the drop-down menu in the admin section, but populated it with data pulled from the records table to eliminate my original problem. To my Record model I added a public static function that selects the distinct labels with the text as the key and the value to pass to the drop-down menu, and then was able to greatly simplify a lot of my code. 

I just pushed this up a few minutes ago, and so far haven't found any problems, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. If anyone finds any errors in the Record Collection page or the API please let me know.

As a side note, having PHPUnit tests for everything already set up made this a whole lot easier. I didn't have to go through and check every possible combination of things that could be searched or test adding and editing and all of that because I already had the tests written. I used to rely on a QA department to regression test everything, but PHPUnit makes all of that much easier and instead of waiting days to have QA people check everything I can do it in under a minute myself.

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