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?
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: