Re: many-to-many relationship - Mailing list pgsql-sql

At 06:20 AM 10/7/2008, [email protected] wrote:
>Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 15:08:02 +0200
>From: Louis-David Mitterrand <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: many-to-many relationship
>Message-ID: <[email protected]>
>X-Archive-Number: 200810/13
>X-Sequence-Number: 31655
>
>Hi,
>
>Say you have several objects (tables): person, location, event, etc. 
>all
>of which can have several images attached.
>
>What is the best way to manage relations between a single 'image' 
>table
>and these different objects?
>
>For now each 'image' row has pointers to id_person, id_location,
>id_event, etc. (only one of which is used for any given row).
>
>Is there a better way, more elegant way to do it, without using
>redundant id_* pointers on each row and yet still enforce foreign 
>keys?
>
>Thanks,

Hi,

I think the relationship tables method works pretty well but I have 
another suggestion. You could store the Foreign table name within image 
table as well as the Foreign key.

|id|image_url|f_table|f_key
|1 |url......|person |1234
|2 |url2.....|event  |5678

I think this is called a "polymorphic join" but I could be wrong about 
that. I'd guess you could construct a rule or trigger to validate the 
foreign key data on insert/update but that's out of my skill area.

Hope that helps a little,

Steve