At 14:43 19.02.2003, Jono Bacon said:
--------------------[snip]--------------------
>At the moment I have three tables: Topic, Message, Comment. A topic has
>messages and each message can have comments. I have set this up with a
>table each and a field for the id of the parent (e.g. a comment will
>have the id of the message that it refers to).
>
>My mate said to me that I should really put all of this in one big table
>with a parent and child field. He said that my code should then figure
>out what is the child of what and how it is displayed.
This are one-to-many relationships? If yes, then your mate is wrong, you
can't easily implement one-to-many using a single table.
A problem like yours is usually laid out like this (pseudocode):
TABLE TOPIC
id integer primary key;
topic varchar;
TABLE MESSAGE
id integer primary key;
id_topic integer foreign key references TOPIC(id);
message text;
TABLE COMMENT
id integer primary key;
id_message integer foreign key references MESSAGE(id);
comment text;
>I have two questions about this:
>
> 1. First, is this idea of using one big table with parent/child
>fields better than my seperate table approach?
See above.
> 2. Secondly, how would I write the logic for the single table approach.
Forget it, use the approach above :)
--
>O Ernest E. Vogelsinger
(\) ICQ #13394035
^ http://www.vogelsinger.at/
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