February 25, 2008 at 9:33 am
Hi Experts,
I am trying to develop an online forum (school project) database. the requirements would be that we will have several topics and each topic will have many messages from different users. Users can post new messages and edit their messages. it would be similar to one we have here, in SQL Central.
like, i would start with Forum Table
(
Forum_ID int
Forum_Name varchar(100)
Forum_description varchar(500)
)
and i would have a table called Thread
(Thread_ID
Thread_description varchar(200)
Thread_starter_user varchar(100)
Thread_replies int
Thread_views int
Forum_ID int
last_post datetime
)
if there are some leads + examples, please advise.
thank you All for any help/comments.
February 25, 2008 at 1:57 pm
is the forum for a school work assignment, or is the forum to be used by your school?
if it will be used by your school there are quite a few open source discussion board packages. why reinvent the wheel? check out http://drupal.org/features for starts.
if it's an assignment, look at other forums and begin to identify all of the unique attributes of a forum, a thread, and a post. notice that on this forum, a new thread (post) has a subject and a description. also, your users should ideally be keyed by an artificial key (like a numeric id) rather than (what appears to be) their name (varchar(100)).
i don't know if you'd consider it 'cheating' but many discussion board packages detail their schema in their documentation. take a look at how they've structured their tables to help you with yours. 😀
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