Question

Som Im trying to design an e-commerce system where vendor is able to add a product to be displayed on the site. The vendor can edit/update the product details, but they should not go “live” until and unless an admin reviews it.

I have several models that represent different products. Here is the design for one such product, but this same system will be applied to every product type.

Here is the diagram:

Can I get some feedback on the pros and cons of this approach.
Is there a better approach to solving this problem.
Is this scalable?

Thanks

Answer 1

What is in the is_current_products and awaiting_approvals tables should be stored as a column and not a separate table.

Since current products will be queried a lot (each time a customer visits the site), it would be a big overhead to first fetch the is_current_products table then display the results from products. It will be an even bigger headache when you want to sort the products table.

How I would design this is have two tables: products and product_versions, where products represent all the approved information, and product_versions represent all the information regardless whether they are approved or historical.

Rough schema:

products
-id
-current_version_id
-#all the product information from newest approved version#

product_versions
-id
-product_id
-approved_by (can be null)
-approved_on (can be null)
-#all the product information from this version#

To display current product information, accessing the products table is sufficient.

To fetch the versions pending approval, just fetch all the ProductVersion where the approved_by or approved_on attribute is null.

To approve a version,
approved_by and approved_on will be changed on product_version, and information of product is changed to the current version, including current_version_id.

With this design, you can also revert to a older version while keeping all other versions in tact.

Hope this helps.