Question

In a web application, there are messages (text) sent from one user to another in the system. Both users are stored in a user table and each message is held in a message table. The user table contains a one-to-many relation to the message and the message contains all the data associated with what was sent.

However, I would like to track the messages, so that reply’s on a message are tracked together. i.e. if User A sends message to User B and User B sends a reply, then User A would see a layout something like:

message 1
   message 2

How do you model messages in a database, when the messages need to be tracked as to which message is a reply and which messages are another “thread”?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Maybe try to add an Auto Increment id field to every reply. Then add a field [let’s name it: replyto]. replyto would contain the id of the message it was sent as a reply to. Then just play around the HTML and CSS to create styles to display the different “threads”.

Hope this helps.