Question

I’m developing with CakePHP 2.0 and MySQL.

I’m trying to create a minibus booking solution but I’m unsure if I’m following the right approach.

We have one minibus which we can book out. I’m not bothered about booking times overlapping at this stage. I’ve made a table for the minibus properties but I need to define the relationship between the minibus and the passengers.

Each minibus can have many (16) passengers.
A passenger can travel on more than one minibus (one today, one tomorrow etc).

Also I need to be able to set the type of passenger to either passenger or driver.
Will this need three tables? I was thinking:

Buses table (id, description)
Users table (id, firstName)
Passengers table (buses.id, users.id, passenger_type)

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I think I would introduce a Trip table and assign the bus to an instance of a Trip. Then introduce a junction table to resolve the many-to-many relationship between Trips and Passengers.