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Asked: 2026-05-20T22:07:41+00:00

I have a site that scrapes all the episodes from tv.com from certain series.

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I have a site that scrapes all the episodes from tv.com from certain series.

So my database has a User table, a Show table, an Episode table, a Show_User table (to associate shows with users, HABTM), an Episode_Show table (to associate episodes with shows, HABTM), a Episode_User table (to associate episodes with shows, only as a way of marking them as ‘watched’).

Now I want to add a way of marking an episode as ‘downloaded’ too.

So at the moment, the Episode_User table has two fields, Episode_Id and User_Id. Should I create a new table entirely for this? Or just add a field to the Episode_User table?

I’m using CakePHP’s automagic features, and don’t particularly want to break it. But if I have to, I have to…

Thanks for any advice.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t see why you would want to create a new table for episodes a user has downloaded. To me it would make the most sense to modify the Episode_User table to have a field for watched and a field for downloaded, since it’s all relating back to the same pair of entities, users and episodes.

    However, any time I’ve stored information about a relationship between two tables in that manner, I’ve found that regardless of the framework I’m using, the ORM inevitably become more complicated, but I don’t think there’s any way around there.

    With CakePHP for handling those kinds of complicated situations, read up about the model behavior, Containable. It’s not very well documented in the CakePHP book, but is really quite useful in a situation where you need to use the fields in Episode_User, for example, if you needed to find all of the users that had watched a particular episode, but not downloaded it.

    Also, it occurred to me, while reading your post, that you could possibly make your data model more simple by having a hasMany relationship between shows and episodes. An episode will never belong to more than one show, so your episodes table could just have another field, show_id, which related back to the show table, and you wouldn’t even need the Episode_Show table.

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