Modeling an internal messaging system, how would you do?

Hey,

on my site, I've got an internal messaging system. A message can be saved, sender and recipient are saved as properties. Then, also one status number is saved, which indicates whether the message is sent/ read/deleted either on the sender side or on the recipient side. As I relaunch the system, the question came to my mind, if I should it model another way. For example, I could associate the User and Message model over a intermediate model, where for example, I could save some more data, which refers directly to the relation. A message could then also have multiple recipient, for example, if I model the intermediate table 1:m.

There are many ways to do this, I think.

I just wanted to ask, how do you model this and why in this specific way?

Thank you very much, ms

I too would like to know if there is a conventional way of modeling this. I'm working on the same thing. For what it's worth, I created two models: message-thread, and message. The message thread only carries the "subject" of the message, as I feel this doesn't need to be stored with each individual message. Each subsequent message related to that subject is a child of the message-thread.

Good question. I'm looking forward to what others think.

I've used the restful_ezm plugin with good results - the message model may be a little simplistic for some scenarios, but it works well most of the time. I've forked it and fixed a few issues (not correctly escaping boolean values in DB conditions, for instance) at:

http://github.com/al2o3cr/restful_ezm/tree/master

It may be overkill for your app, as it also generates a default MessagesController, but could be of some inspiration.

--Matt Jones