Question

For a system where a user can be a member or admin, users with the member role must either pay for it with a recurring subscription, or be given a complimentary access.

My current approach:

• Users have a user database table.
• A subscription table includes a record for a user if they have a subscription.
• A subscription_event table records each billing or failed payment. I can query this to see if the last event was indeed a successful payment.

But how should I record if a user is given “complimentary” access?

• Have another table complimentary_subscription with the user ID as the foreign key?
• Record a special “subscription” for them in subscription?
• Or add another column to their user row for columns like is_complimentary and complimentary_expires_date?
• Add a more general expires column to the user row?

Answer 1

Question Review

As @leanne said, you’re modeling a Subscription whose specializations are, say, MonthlySubscription and ComplimentarySubscription (to give them a name for this answer).

You know that a subscription can expire:

• For a MonthlySubscription, that happens when a user didn’t pay the current month’s subscription
• For a ComplimentarySubscription, the expiration date is assigned when it’s assigned to the user

As you can see an ExpirationDate is an essential attribute of any Subscription, but the way you store it is different in each case. If the first case you’ll have to calculate it based on the last event, in the latter you can retrieve it directly.

Dealing with Inheritance in the Data Base

So, to map this sample model to a database schema, you could go with the Class Table Inheritance pattern described in Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book. Here is its intent:

“Represents an inheritance hierarchy of classes with one table for each class”.

Basically you’ll have a table with the attributes shared in common between the classes, and you’ll be storing attributes specific to each class in a separate table.

Keeping this in mind, let’s review the options you proposed:

• Have another table complimentary_subscription with the user ID as the foreign key?

Having a separate table for storing ComplimentarySubscription specific details sound good, but if you don’t relate this one with the subscription table, you can end up with an user that has both a MonthlySubscription and a ComplimentarySubscription. Its foreign key should point to the subscription table, which is the one that tells you if a user has a subscription or not (and you’ll have to enforce up to one subscription per user).

• Record a special “subscription” for them in subscription?

Yes, you’ll have to record that a user has a subscription either monthly or complimentary. But if you’re thinking something like recording a special subscription whose amount is zero, you’re looking for a solution that matches your current design instead of searching for the right model for it (it might and it might be not).

• Or add another column to their user row for columns like is_complimentary and complimentary_expires_date?

Personally I don’t like this one because you’re putting information where it doesn’t belong. Taking that into account, where you will be storing the expiration date for complimentary subscriptions (remember that for monthly ones you are calculating it, and not storing the expiration date)? It seems that all that information is crying for its own “home”.
Also, if later you need to add a new type of subscription that table will begin to clutter.

• Add a more general expires column to the user row?

If you do this, you’ll have to deal with data synchronization each time the subscription_event gets changed (in the case of a monthly subscription). Generally I try to avoid this data-duplication situation.

Sample Solution

What I would do to favor extensibility when adding new types of subscription is to have the subscription table to store shared details between MonthlySubscripton and ComplimentarySubscription, adding a type column key that’ll let you differentiate which kind of subscription a row is related to.

Then, store details specific to each subscription type in its own table, referencing the parent subscription row.

For retrieving data, you’ll need an object in charge of instantiating the right type of Subscription given the type column value for a subscription row.

You can take a look at the pattern in the “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” book for further assistance on how to define the type column values, how to use a mapper object to do the Subscription instantiation and so on.

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01/03/2012 Update: Alternatives for defining and handling the type column

Here’s an update to clarify the following question posted by @enoinoc in the comments:

Specifically for the suggested type column, could this be a foreign key pointing to a Plans table which describes different types of subscriptions, such as how many months before they expire without payment. Does that sound logical?

It’s ok to have that information in the Plans table, as long it´s not static information that doesn´t need to be edited. If that’s the case, don’t over-generalize your solution and put that knowledge in the corresponding Subscription subclass.

About the foreign key approach, I can think of some drawbacks going that way:

• Remember that your goal is to know wich subclass of Subscription to use for each row in the Plans table. If all you got is a foreign key value (say, an integer) you’ll have to write code to map that value with the class to use. That means extra work for you 🙂
• If you have to do unnecesary extra work, it’s likely that mainteinance will be a pain: each time you add a new plan, you’ll have to remember hardcoding it’s foreign key value in the mapping code.
• Foreign keys might change in case of improper database export/import operations. If that happens, your mapping code will no longer work and you’ll have to deploy your software again (or, at least, the part that changed).

Proposed Solution

What I’d do is to put into the type column in the Plans table. That column will hold the name of the class that knows how to build the right Subscription from a particular row.

But: why do we need an object to build each type of Subscription? Because you’ll be using information from different tables (subscription_event and complimentary_subscription) for building each type of object, and it´s always good to isolate and encapsulate that behavior.

Let’s see how the Plans table might look like:

— Plans Table —

Id | Name | Type | Other Columns…

1 | Monthly | MonthlySubscriptionMapper |

2 | Complimentary | ComplimentarySubscriptionMapper |

Each SubscriptionMapper can define a method Subscription MapFrom(Row aRow) that takes a row from the database and gives you the right instance of the Subscription subclass (MonthlySubscription or ComplimentarySubscription in the example).

Finally to get an instance of the mapper specified in the type column (without using a nasty if or case statements) you can take the class name from the column’s value and, by using reflection, create an instance of that class.