Question

So I am in the process of attempting to create a basic user system and within this system I want users to be able to have multiple roles.

Say for example I have the roles as follows: Administrator, Events Organiser, Donator

What is the best way to assign these multiple roles to a user and then check if they have any of these roles for showing certain permissions.

If it was only one role per person then it wouldn’t be a problem as I’d just assign say Administrator = 10, Organiser = 5 and Donator = 1 and then do an if statement to check if the MySQL data is equal to any of those three numbers.

I can’t imagine there is a way to add a MySQL Field and fill it with say “Administrator,Donator” and therefore that user would have both of those roles?

Is it just a case of I would need to create 3 separate fields and put a 0 or a 1 in those fields and check each one separately?

Answer 1

Use multiple tables and join them:

User
--------------
id    name
 1    test

Role
--------------
id    name
 1    Donator
 2    Organizer
 3    Administrator

User_Role
--------------
id    user_id    role_id
 1    1          1
 2    1          3


SELECT * FROM User u 
    LEFT JOIN User_Role ur ON u.id = ur.user_id
    LEFT JOIN Role r ON ur.role_id = r.id
WHERE r.name = "Administrator";

The query is easier if you know you only have 3 roles and they are easy to remember.

SELECT * FROM User u LEFT JOIN User_Role ur ON u.id = ur.user_id WHERE ur.role_id = 3;