Very basic Message Board - Reply Method

astronomy92

I am in the process of creating a very simplistic message board system and im completely lost as to how to create a reply method for it(3 weeks running round in circles 😕).

There is one sql database for it (using phpmyadmin) consisting of a table - 'threads'.

threads
id - primary key, auto incrementing
comment_title
comment
author
time

the time of the post goes into 'time' the author of the post goes into author, a user submitted message goes into comment and the messae title goes into 'comment_title'.

next the data is shown on a form(the message titles as a link to another form displaying the message).

Heres where im stuck, i cant figure out to make a reply to the message that is posted. I thought about using the primary key 'id' in the threads table somehow to link the reply message to a specific post but im completely unsure how to go about this (each post has a unique id number).

Im fairly new to sql and php.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

johanafm

You have mixed up your naming, which is probably what throws you off track.

thread
------------
id auto
name
created
created_by

post
-----------
id auto
thread_id
author
title
body
created

Now, when a new thread is created, a new id is generated. Each post (including the first one), goes into table "post", and the corresponding thread.id is inserted as value for post.thread_id.

When you want to show posts in a given thread, you

-- @thread is the viewed thread's id, probably given by a link query string: ?thread=1234
-- Have a look at your browser's address bar when viewing this thread for an example...
SELECT relevant, fields FROM post WHERE thread_id = @thread
ORDER BY created ASC

If you're going to use pagination (i.e. show a subset of posts on each page) and also want to show the original post on each page, I'd move the first post (when the thread is created) into the thread table. Otherwise I'd leave it in the post table.

astronomy92

Thanks very much your suggestions have been helpful🙂. Ive figured it out now. I was definately getting a bit confused - been working on it way to long.