Question

I am working on a feature for categorizing things. All items can have 0 or n children.

There will also be a need for 2 or more unrelated parents to have the same child..but maybe that won’t be too necessary.

How do people create a schema for this? Is it a matter of having this sort of table columns:

category_id | category_name | parent_id | child_id

Or is there some way of doing this that is more elegant and flexible?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

If you’re speaking of tagging items, then you’d normally have an articles table, a taxonomy_terms table, and then a join table like articles_taxonomy_terms, which articles can have any number of related terms (tags).