Question

In my ASP.NET MVC3 application, I am having users, roles and entities. User Roles will be having access to entities. So while storing users and roles in database which of following is good approach?

1. To store user list in the entity tables

2. Entity Ids in the user table.

In future the number of entities may increase to 1000,10000 so I want to consider the performance aspect also.

Answer 1

I think the relationship between Role and Entity is many- to many. One role can have zero or more entities and one Entity may belongs to zero or more Role. So create a third table to store those with 2 columns, RoleId and EntityID

Sample data would look like

ROLE_ID        ENTITY_ID
-----------------------------------
1              144
1              146
2              194
4              14
4              194