I am working on a small project where a client would like to have a custom comment system to be shared within the internal network of there company. The logic is something like Google+, Facebook (other?) Where a user will make a Post and have the ability to choose people to share it with where the default (none) will go to everyone in that persons list.
My question is what is the best way to build up a table to store posts where it could have all or select people as the able viewers of said post. I guess my biggest issue is wrapping my head around the logic of it at the moment. Do I have multiple rows per post each with an id of the user(s) able to see said post, should I have a column on a single row for the post where I store an array or object of people able to view the post, I am open to suggestions. I haven’t started working on it as of yet. So I am ultimately looking for advice on a good way to build the table that would support sound query logic, that won’t cost me over head on either multiple queries or multiple rows I don’t need. Don’t want to begin without figuring something out as I don’t want to box myself into something that will be harder to back out of in the long run.
What you are proposing is a one-to-many relationship. There is a ton of information about db relationships on the internet. Each Post could have Many people that would be allowed to use it. So you would have a posts table and a users table and a users_post table. The users post table would contain a post_id and a user_id. You would then have to check if the user could view the post through this relationship.
You could also put the users in groups, which would simplify this.
You should never store multiple values in an array in one column of the db.