Question

I currently have two joined tables in a SQL Server database, one with news items (newsTab) and a table (usrCom) which captures multiple user comments for each article.

I want to add another information table (infoTab) which will also allow users to comment but I wish to use the existing comments table (usrCom) to store these.

How do I go about creating a linking/bridge table which generates a unique ID so I know which table (newsTab/infoTab) the comments belong to.

NB: I’ve edited the message to hopefully make it a bit clearer

First Table (newsTab)

NewsId    NewsContent
---------------------
1         blah blah
2         and so on

Second Table (infoTab)

infoId    InfoContent    
---------------------
1         some info
2         more stuff

Comments Table (as is currently)

commentId    linksTo   Comment
------------------------------
1            1         user input
2            1         random rant

‘linksTo’ is a foriegn key to the items in the first table, so I cannot just add a type column and I would get conflicts on the foreign key column if a row did not exist in the new table with the same ID. So hence the need for a new generated foreign key based upon the table and Id that was being commented on.

Answer 1

Why not just a “type” column to the usrCom