CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mysqldatabase-design
Vishnu Sadanandan
Vishnu Sadanandan

Reputation: 64

How to Manage Guest Users with Php and SQL

I am using PHP , MySQL for Handling My site. I have a user table called user_table containing user_id PRIMARY and Now user can chat with other user. For that I am using a table called message_table. this table contains essential fields like msg_id , sender_id , reciver_id , replay_id etc. this works very fine.But I need to handle also guest users[Not registered] with this chat. how can I handle them. I inserted the guset_id as the mixture of entering time and his name to a table called guest_table. Now I can use this guest_table like user_table. Is that a good idea ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1376

Answers (1)

O. Jones
O. Jones

Reputation: 108641

But I need to handle also guest users[Not registered] with this chat.

These guests look to me like a special sort of user. I suggest you handle them as if they were users. You may wish to put a column called something like is_guest in your user table, and set it to 1 when you know the user is a guest.

Keeping a separate table, parallel to the user table, for your guests is NOT a good idea. It will greatly complicate your queries, especially when a person in your user table communicates with a person in your guest table.

Instead, put everybody in the user table, guests and registered users alike.

A nice little benefit: if you convert a guest to a registered user, all you have to do is flip the is_guest flag and let them specify their own username and other data. They get to keep their history.

Upvotes: 2

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