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need help for a detailed project

Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 6:21 pm
by soul
Hi all,
Im dealin' with an online messaging project for a school of nearly a thousand students. The idea is that any student can send some messages to another student, and that student can accept/reject/edit the message he receives. These messages will then be printed out on a document at the end of each season. There will be two documents printed, one is personal (for each student), and it includes all messages he had received; the other is a common book which includes 5 or 6 messages per student. So in the online system, all messages that a student had received will be on his personal document, and using the system, student should be able to select some of those messages for the common book. It is assumed that everybody knows each other, so there will not be any profile or picture things. It can be thought as a personal forum where there are 1000 different forums for 1000 different students. Each person can just write (send message) once for another person. (a student should not get multiple messages from another student). I have some different ideas for the database and for the project, however I am not sure which one is the best. Using a database with 3 tables (students, personal messages, common book messages) seems to be enough but I am not sure about what to store on these tables..

This is what I have just thought:
for students table:
studentid, name, pass, email
for personalmessages table:
messageid, source(from whom,as studentid), destination (to whom,as studentid), msgtext
for commonbook table:
messageid, destination(messages to whom), msgtext

Any other suggestions or additions?
And any helpful tips for the coding staff?

Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 7:50 pm
by smpdawg
Are you going to actually delete the message or just mark it as deleted? You may want to add a status flag(s) to the message tables so you can flag a messge as read, deleted, edited, etc.

How about keeping a copy of the original unedited message if you let them do an edit?

What about the user status? Maybe you need to delete a user for some reason. If so, you would probably want to flag the user as inactive but not delete them so you can keep the messages.

These basic ideas revolve around being able to log messages if need be and have them stored in the event that you need to review them later for some reason.

You could add lots of stuff to this project, but where do you begin?

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 4:48 am
by jonemo
maybe all messages in one table and then marking them as common or personal in another table?