CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sql-serverdatabasewebrelational-databaseentity-relationship
imran.razak
imran.razak

Reputation: 298

How to share information between users?

I am building a software where I have users who are responsible for managing contracts. Each user can only see the contracts that they are responsible for.

Now, I want to implement a share functionality where a user can decide to share some of the contract details with another user, so the other user can now see in his contracts list a shared contract.

But first, I want to make sure that I implement this correctly in terms of the database.

So at the moment, I have the following with regards to the relation between the users and contracts:

user (1) manages contracts (1..*)

And to implement the share functionality, I added the following:

user (0..*) can see contracts (0..*)

Which resulted in a new table that I called SharedContracts. This table will store the userID of the user who will now have access to the contract and contractID of the shared contract.

So what will happen now is that whenever user A decides to share his contract details with user B, the SharedContracts table will be used to store this data.

And the next time user B logs in, the system will check if he has a shared contract by querying the SharedContracts table. The the system will select all contractIDs that are associated with his userID.

I want to know if this is the correct way to implement a functionality like this? Is there any other way? Can I run into some problems if it stays like this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 357

Answers (1)

Collin Barrett
Collin Barrett

Reputation: 2569

I think your proposed architecture would be fine. The only modification I would suggest is including the IDs of both the user who shared the contract as well as the recipient of the share in the SharedContracts table. This will allow for the user who shared a contract to revoke that share at a later date.

SharedContracts

+----------+------------------+------------+
| SharerId | ShareRecipientId | ContractId |
+----------+------------------+------------+
|        1 |                2 |          1 |
+----------+------------------+------------+

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions