Question

I am building a web application that has users and orders. I have a question about how to handle the relationship between the two.

An order belongs to a user. But here’s the twist, a user can optionally choose to outsource an order to another user.

When an order is outsourced, the original user still remains the owner and only he can modify certain things like price, quantity etc on the order.
The user the order is outsourced to can view some of the order information and can update specific properties on the order like marking as fulfilled.
An outsourced order should show up on both users “orders index”.

All the users are “equal” meaning on certain orders a user might be the owner and on others he might be fulfilling the order. A user can also fulfill his own orders.

It doesn’t seem like a true many to many relationship as one of the users doesn’t really own the order, he just has limited access to it.

What would be the simplest way to handle this order/users relationships? I would like to avoid using a complete permission system, is there a way to simply handle this with an “outsourced” table? How about having a user_id and outsourced_to field on the order table?

Thanks for your input!

If it’s of any help, the application uses Laravel.

Answer 1

It seems like your Orders table has two separate relationships with the Users table.
Orders have an owns/owned-by relationship to Users.

Users(1) -- owns -- (*)Orders

One User can own many Orders. One Order is owned by only one User

Then there is a completely separate outsourced-to relationship between Orders and Users.

Orders(*) -- outsourced-to -- (1)Users

(Here I assume that an Order can only be outsourced to one other User. A User may have many Orders outsourced to them.)

The best way to represent this is to have the Orders table have a ‘owner’ foreign key column into the Users table and another ‘outsourced_to’ foreign key column also to the Users table.

What columns of Orders the outsourced user can edit will be controlled by the code and not by the dB.

A separate outsourced table will be needed only if Orders can be outsourced to multiple Users at the same time.