Seeking some advice

Sorry for the vague subject. I couldn't think of a more descriptive one.

I'm working on an app in which users are able to send one another messages. I'd like for each user to have a sent folder, as well as an inbox. A user's inbox should show who the message came from, and the sent folder should show to whom it went. I want to only store one copy of each message, and let the sender and receiver "delete" the message independently of one another. My first stab was this (non-relevant code omitted):

class Member < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :mail_messages, :dependent => :nullify   has_many :sent_messages, :class_name => 'MailMessage',       :foreign_key => :sender_id, :dependent => :nullify end

class MailMessage < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :member   belongs_to :sender, :class_name => 'Member', :foreign_key => 'sender_id' end

This works exactly as it should. When a user is destroyed, the sender_id or member_id field for each message related to them is nullified appropriately. The plan was to have a reaper run periodically to delete rows from the mail_messages table where both member_id and sender_id are null (in other words, both the sender and receiver have deleted the message from their respective views).

There's a fly in this ointment, though. If the sender is destroyed, the sender_id field of the message is nullified, and the receiver's view can no longer show who the message came from. Likewise for the sender if the receiver is destroyed.

The only solution I've thought of is to add two more fields to the mail_messages table to store the sender's and receiver's ID - not for purposes of associating the mail_message record to the members, but just to be able to show who the sender and recipient are in UI views. This strikes me as unclean, though. I'm not crazy about the idea of duplicating information in a row. I'm hoping someone out there has a better idea I'm not thinking of?

Thanks . . .

I love embarrassing myself in public forums. After thinking about this since sometime yesterday and deciding to seek advice, it finally struck me after I sent this message: even if I do duplicate the sender and receiver ID in the mail_messages rows, once either of them are destroyed their ID becomes a meaningless number from which no information can be gleaned. So my options are, I guess, to store their display name (i.e., "Bob" instead of "45398") for the UI views, or simply show messages to/from deleted members as being to/from an account that no longer exists (a la MySpace).

Thanks for listening to me think out loud, everyone. You've been very helpful. :slight_smile:

Or rather than deleting the user, just flag the user as "inactive".