I want to create a skill which is persistent between several users within an household.
For example, if user A says something, save it to the DB so user B (within the same household) can query it.
Is there a unique ID for that?
A solution I thought about is asking the users for an household name and use it along with some global incremental int as primary key?
You could have multiple skills, each with a different activation name, but linked on your backend to the same account. By using the different skills, the user is identified.
This is how I handle my personal household skill to distinguish between my preferences and my wife's.
From a commercial perspective, you'll need a name or set of names that make sense as a group and your brand.
Related
I'm creating a db schema that involves users that can have multiple users.
I want to register different companies to use the web services.
For example:
user A or B (etc) can signup and create a company account
user A can create multiple accounts of other users with their types, similarly user B
If user A or B create different accounts, how would I know this particular user is belong to User A or B company ? I think user table have many to many relationship with itself (like basic friendship design).
Please suggest the best design .
Ex.
User 3,4 belongs to User A
User 5,6 belongs to User B
In general, I would recommend starting by identifying all the entities you are trying to persist. It sounds like you have two distinct entities in your question. One being "user," which represents a single person. Your second entity is "company." A "user" can belong to a company.
An example of a database design would be one table for users, and one table for companies. In the "users" table, you would want to have a foreign key column that references the primary key (unique id) of the company the user belongs to. If each user can only belong to one company, this becomes a simple one to many relationship.
In short, I would highly recommend treating company accounts separately from user accounts, since they are fundamentally different entities.
I want to make an application where there will be different users and each user will have a set of friends which will be put in categories. There will be some default categories, but the user will be able to add his own. I was wondering which will be the best way to do this.
My idea is to have 3 tables - user, friends and categories.
The user table to have fields (one to many) for friends and categories (but I don't know if the user table will need any information about the friends and the categories at all).
The friends table to have a field for categories (one to many) and a field for the user (many to one).
The category table to have fields for user (many to many?) and friends (many to many?).
I'm not sure about the relations, too. I'm using PHP with MySQL and Symfony2 and Doctrine2. Please help!
EDIT
Maybe I haven't described exactly what I need. When you open the app, you see a login form. If you don't have an account, you should register - the registration creates a new user. This user isn't connected with other users (I'm still new to programming and I want something a little easier so it's something like phonebook). Each user has a list of friends and a firend is a row in a table with fields such as name, addres, phone, email, photo, birthday and so on, but they are added by the current user. The friends are not users. Every user is in fact an account with password and username and when you log in there is just a list of friends. So each user creates categories for himself and he has nothing to do with other users and their categories. The category will have only id and name.
So the idea is that you create an account, then create some categories and add friends to them just to have an organiser when you friends are born or where they live, or which is their phone number, but you create them and add the information about them, they are to users themselves. It's not like a social network. Just a notebook where each user can write info about his friends.
First of all, you need to understand the role of intersection tables: if user A labels user B as a friend (i.e. there is a many-to-many relation from user to itself), and you create a new table to represent that relation (the friends table), any additional information about this "friendship" should be linked to that table. So, if a user categorizes his friends in some way, the category applies to friends, not to user. There's no need for a relation between category and user for this specific purpose.
Update: since friends are not users, the friends table will not be an intersection table (and thus have only one reference back to user, denoting the "owner"), but the rest of the answer still applies.
I'm assuming each category will be a row in the category table. Additional information about the category might be added, but it should be limited to that. For instance, if you want to know which user created a category, you could add a foreign key to user labeled for instance "owner" or "created_by". That might be useful if categories created by one user are not to be seen by others.
Finally, you can relate friends with category. If User A can put user B in at most one category, then a foreign key from friends to category should suffice (i.e. a one to many relation). Otherwise, you might need another many-to-many relation, so an additional intersection table should be created (for instance friend_category).
You could avoid this extra table by employing denormalization, having multiple rows in friends where both users are the same (and in the same order) but the category is different (see also this example). Whether this is advantageous or not is beyond the scope of this answer, but IMHO using an extra table is better for now (it might seem more complicated, but it will be easier to maintain in the long run). (Update: if friends is not an intersection table, denormalizing like this is not really an option, so stick with the friend_category table)
In the end, your layout would look like this:
user friends friend_category category
---- ------- --------------- --------
(user fields) <-- user (owner) <-- friend (category fields)
(friend fields) category --> user (owner) --+
^ |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
I can suggest the following table set for this (this scheme applies to the phonebook or social network tasks as well):
Table "Users" that stores all the information about users:
UserId
Name
Phone
Address
... (any other fields)
Table "Categories" that stores information about relationship categories:
CategoryId
Name
Table "Relationships" that stores information about relationships between users:
FirstUserId -> Link to Users table
SecondUserId -> Link to Users table
CategoryId -> Link to Categories table
So, any user is able to add new categories, and then reference them when adding new relationship to another person.
If you need to select all user's friends, you will have to:
select fr.* from Relationships r join Users fr on r.SecondUserId = fr.UserId where r.FirstUserId = <Current user id>
I would like to make a model agency based on codeigniter, but im a but stuck with the database, exactly the registration part.
I would like to allow users to sign up as, model, photohgrapher, agency, or make-up artist.
So could someoone give me an opinion how to make the database? Like seperate the models, photographers, agencies, and artists in diferent tables, and at the registration form only ask for baseic info? like name, password, email, D.O.B., or there is a nother way?.
Thank you
You should use entity sub-typing with a parent type of "USER", which will contain your basic information, and with sub-types of "MODEL", "AGENCY", "PHOTOGRAPHER", "MAKEUP_ARTIST". This will allow you to have a better user experience for the inevitable case where there is overlap. I'm sure there are photographers who have agencies and agencies that do make-up etc. It would be much better for these types of users to have a single user ID and password despite having different types of profiles.
Make a drop down for different type of people signing up which the data for drop down comes from a separate table (e.g. person_type) from database and save the basic details of the person in separate table with the ID of the person_type table.
You can make a model for getting, inserting and updating records for this purpose.
I have a table of users in SQL Server with all the contact details, personal details etc. When each user signs up to my website they will be given the option to opt-in to 5 different types of emails like:
I wish to receive emails about new things
I wish to receive the monthly newsletter
etc etc. I am trying to decide the best way to store this information in a database. My current thinking is to have a seperate table with 5 columns (one for each opt-in) and the value being a bool/bit value.
Since the information wont be required regularly, it will only be required when we want to send mail to user. Are there any better ways / best practices for doing something like this?
The problem with your proposed design is that it becomes difficult to add new email types in the future; you only have 5 now, but what happens when you add a sixth or seventh?.
Instead, I would propose something like:
User Table:
UserID (Primary Key)
User Attributes
EmailTemplate Table
EmailTemplateID (Primary key)
Email Template Attributes
UserEmailTemplates
UserID
EmailTemplateID
You can easily add new templates, and associate them with users.
I'm a noob, development wise and logistically-wise.
I'm developing a site that lets people take a test...
My client wants the ability for a user with the roll/privledge "admin" (a step below a super-admin) to be allowed to create users and only see/edit the users that they create...
The users created in that "category" or group need some information that their superior provides.
For example, I log in as a "manager", I have the ability to invite people to take the test, and manage those people. Before adding those people, I will have filled out a short survey about myself...
Right now, the users that are invited will be asked some of the same questions as the manager. I'd like to cut down the redundancy by using the information put into the database by the manager and apply it to the invited users.
How do I set up my database to work with this criterion? I'm a little confused about how to do this! Let me know if I can add more details...
(This is a mysql and php app)
I am sure there are several ways to do this but here is one that comes to mind.
In the "users" database, I am sure you have a column to specify which manager is assigned to the user by some kind of user key. Well If this field has a value, then pull the info from that users (manager user) record.
Example:
table 'users'
key----name------managerid-----questionone------questiontwo----
1-------randy-----0------------------california----------c++--------------
2-------bob--------1------------------nevada------------------------------
Since record(key)1 has managerid == 0 then use questiontwo record to answer "Question 2".
Since record(key)2 has managerid == 1 then pull questiontwo from record(key)1 and use that for answer to question two.
You could either insert this information into the record or use it from the manager record dynamically as needed, which thought the space is still being used in the database, would be helpful since manager data might be updated and you might not want to have to update all records with that share the managerid wheh info is changed.
Make sense?