Question

I’m trying to sketch out a database template on some design paper, and I’m having trouble with dependencies.

Users submit content to the website for viewing, and the content is given priorities based on what kind of content it is. I also would like the priorities, however, to be set by user. Basically, if person A is person B’s friend, the content submitted by person A is high priority for person B. Person C is not person A’s friend, so the content is low priority for person C in this medium.

I don’t even know where to begin. Any push in the right direction would be appreciated. I think that this is a MySQL question; however, I am using PHP as the server-side scripting language, and I’m wondering if the math makes it so that there isn’t a solution via MySQL.

I’m thinking about just using a region for friend content and not messing with priorities, currently.

Answer 1

As long as you track what you need it shouldn’t be problem, the trick will be in writing the Sql. For instance if you had the following table structure

person
------
id
name
otherstuff

person_releationship
-------------------
person_a_id
person_b_id
relationship_type_id

relationship_type
-------------------------
id
content_priority

content
--------------
id
stuff
person_id
user_priority

You could write the following statement which would retrieve all the content associated with a person, excluding their own content, prioritized by content_priority

SELECT
    stuff
FROM 
    content c
    INNER JOIN person p
    ON c.person_id = p.id
    INNER JOIN person_releationship pr
    ON p.person_id = pr.person_a_id 
       or p.person_id = pr.person_b_id 
    INNER JOIN relationship_type rt
    ON pr.relationship_type_id = rt.id
WHERE
    p.id = "A"
    and c.person_id <> "A"
ORDER BY
    rt.content_priority, 
    c.user_priority

If you want you could also use weighted priority so the ORDER BY could be

ORDER BY
rt.content_priority *  c.user_priority

You should note that this SQL and table design is independent of the RDBMS and the web technology.