[Acute]

Hello everyone,
i'm writing my own forum, and now my database has a table for categories, a table for forums (each forum belongs to only one category), a table for members, a table for threads (each thread belongs to only one forum, and each thread has only on member as thread starter), and a table for posts (each post belongs to only one thread and has only one member as poster). Now the questions is:
how "reply to another reply" posts should be organized in the database?
Thnx

[r937]

Originally Posted by Acute

how "reply to another reply" posts should be organized in the database?

add a column to the posts table called in_reply_to

for posts which start a thread, this column is NULL

for posts that reply to another post, put the other post's key into this column as a foreign key

[Pat Phelan]

I'd be more inclined to use a thread/post model than a reverse linked list like r937 suggested. Create one entity for threads, one entity for posts, and a linking entity for threads and posts.

My reaoning is that you almost always traverse from threads to posts, almost never from posts to threads. While r937's suggestion is technically correct, it is relatively inefficient to implement. My suggestion is a tiny bit more complicated in terms of the ERD, but it is a lot more efficient to code/implement.

-PatP

[Acute]

can you plz describe your idea/method in more details? i'm new in db design so... thnx