Re: several pointers to records in one field

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Le lundi 17 mars 2003, 16:12:32 ou environ CPT John W. Holmes <holmes072000@charter.net> a écrit:
> > I started to use PHP with MySQL last december.
> > Personal use: list of inhabitants of a town in the 15th century
> >
> > Problem is the following: one person has an arbitrary number of children.
> > It is heavy to have fields child1,child2,child3,...,childn containing the
> row
> > number of each child especially if the number of children is variable.
> >
> > When I played with Commodore VIC20 I used to put pointers to records in a
> > string in the form pointer1,pointer2,...,pointern in a string.
> >
> > I think of using explode and implode to put all the record numbers of the
> > children in one varchar field.
> >
> > If someone have a better idea?
> 
> NOOOOO!!! Don't do that... that's horrible database design. :)

I agree and that's why I sent this e-mail.

> 
> You should/could have a separate table for children. It'll have 3 fields
> 
> 1: Unique ID for each child
> 2: ID of parent
> 3: Name of child
> 

Problem is that the child may be a parent too thus he should be at the
same time in the parent's table.

> plus whatever other information you decide to keep on children.
> 
> Notice how extensible this is. You can have an unlimited number of children
> for each parent.
> 
> You could treat this like a forum, too, and use a single table.
> 
> 1. Unique id for each person
> 2. ID of parent
> 3. Name
> etc...
> 
> Where, column 2 would be NULL (or empty) if the person is at the "top" of
> your chain (i.e. their parents aren't in the database). Everyone under them
> (their children, grandchildren, etc) would be in the same table and have
> column 2 as the ID of their parent (coming from the same table).
> 
> Confusing? I hope not, but ask away if it is... :)

I like this solution. It means, when I query the record of an individual
that I have to look at all the records of the table to see who has the
individual as parent to be able to reconstruct the family.
In fact I made a table with parent_ID and ten fields for children_ID
(bad solution I know). The parent_ID field (in fact mother_ID and
father_ID) already exists and I just have to retype my scripts to
reconstitute the family of a particular individual with backward looking
at him from individuals who have him as parent. 

Thank You. Tell me if I misunderstood or if I did not express me
clearly.

> 
> ---John Holmes...

-- 
Alain Barthélemy
cassandre@bartydeux.be
http://bartydeux.be

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