Question

I am creating a ticket system for issues regarding IT. I have the following table:

id                          
userID                                  
priority                                        
details                              
rank                                
conversation                                
order                                   
status                                  
ts

What I need is to be able to display the back and forth between the IT dept and the user as a conversation. So i figure I have the two columns conversation and order. The column conversation would be a unique identifier (number or text) and the order would show the order that the row plays in the converstation (1,2,3 etc).

My question is this:

1. Is this the best way to go about it?
2. how shall I identify each conversation?

I could either generate random PHP 5 char text or something, or give a number, and each user has conversation number 1, number 2 etc. But then If I did that, how would I find out the next number to use for the user using mySQL?

Any thoughts and suggestions would be helpful, thank you.

Answer 1

I’d go for a separate table like @Debock mentioned. I’d structure it a bit differently though:

create table ticket_conversation (
    id                     int not null auto_increment primary key
,   ticket_id              int not null
,   user_id                int not null
,   conversation_text      text
,   conversation_timestamp timestamp default current_timestamp
,   foreign key ticket_id references ticket(id) 
,   foreign key user_id references user(id)
,   key(ticked_id, conversation_timestamp)
)

The timestamp allows you to keep track of when the comment was made, and ordering by it will give you the sequence of comments.