Re: Need help planning my application (associations question)

In a way, you're building groups similar to what you'd do for ACL.

Based on what you've outlined, I would just have the Invitations
belong to a User (sender), and HABTM Users (invitees), and then have
another relationship for "Friends" that would belong to a User, and
contain the Users that are "Friends".

That said, you could also go for a more generic approach like is used
for ACL, and have Users and Groups, where there is a HABTM between
Users and Groups, and then have one Group that would be "Friends" of a
User, and another group that would be the "Invitees" for an event.

You need the join table if the relationship is going to be many-to-
many, you can accomplish the same thing without the join table if you
denormalize the keys back into the other table (which is typically
what you want for one-to-many or one-to-one sorts of relationships).

For example, you could have your "Friends" table include a foreign-key
for owner_user_id (owner) and another for user_id (friends), which
would result in one row in the "Friends" table for each User that is a
"Friend". Really depends on the volume of data and how normalized you
want to make your data model IMHO.

On Nov 30, 5:24 pm, boomswitch <boomswi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> New here, new to CakePHP, but loving it so far.
>
> I'm working on planning a basic invitation application, but I'm
> struggling with how to plan my database and some model associations.
>
> A few things about my current setup:
>
> - CakePHP 1.2-latest, Apache, MySQL
> - I have a working User (authentication) model
>
> For this invitation system, there are a few seemingly simple
> requirements that I'm struggling to design properly within Cake:
>
> - Users can invite Friends to events.
> - Users can invite Users to events.
> - Friends are registered users that Users have added to their Friends
> list.
>
> In other words, all persons invited to an event are registered users.
> However, some are marked Friends and some aren't. How can I relate
> this all properly to the User model? I think I have a few of these
> right, but I'm wondering if there's a better way to keep Friends Lists
> and also associate both Friends and non-Friends (Users) to
> Invitations.
>
> - Invitations "belongTo" a User (the creator/owner).
> - User "hasMany" Invitations.
> - Invitations have many invitees which can be Friends or non-Friends
> -- all of which are Users.
>
> How do I store my list of all the invitees for an Invitation? Would I
> need an  Aquaintances model (for non-Friends that are invited) with an
> hasAndBelongsToMany association and use a join table in MySQL? Or
> would there be a simpler design...
>
> Currently, I've got a working Friends List by using a join table that
> stores user_id and friend_id.
>
> All feedback is greatly appreciated, be gentle, I'm new to PHP and
> specifically CakePHP. :)
>
> Thanks!
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