Question

I am building a basic social network for fun and would like to divide the site’s content based on a user’s email address. All functionality would be the same across the entire site, only the content would differ.

For example if a user signs up with a @berkeley.edu email address they can only friend, and comment, and view etc. other @berkeley.edu users. And users with @uoregon.edu email addresses can only friend, comment, and view, etc. other @uoregon.edu users.

What would be a good technique to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You could multi-tenant the system keyed off of the email domain – then all queries would operate off of the that tenant key.

For example…

Tenant Table

id, domain (1, ‘berkeley.edu’)

id, domain (2, ‘uoregon.edu’)

User Table

id, tenantId, email (1, 1, ‘[e-mail]’)

id, tenantId, email (2, 1, ‘[e-mail]’)

id, tenantId, email (3, 2, ‘[e-mail]’)

Whenever you run a query, you include:

WHERE tenantId = 1

To only show users, content, messages, images etc from Berkeley.