Foreign Key Relationships and "belongs to many"
- by jan
I have the following model:
S belongs to T
T has many S
A,B,C,D,E (etc) have 1 T each, so the T should belong to each of A,B,C,D,E (etc)
At first I set up my foreign keys so that in A, fk_a_t would be the foreign key on A.t to T(id), in B it'd be fk_b_t, etc. Everything looks fine in my UML (using MySQLWorkBench), but generating the yii models results in it thinking that T has many A,B,C,D (etc) which to me is the reverse.
It sounds to me like either I need to have A_T, B_T, C_T (etc) tables, but this would be a pain as there are a lot of tables that have this relationship. I've also googled that the better way to do this would be some sort of behavior, such that A,B,C,D (etc) can behave as a T, but I'm not clear on exactly how to do this (I will continue to google more on this)
What do you think is the better solution?
UML:
Here's the DDL (auto generated). Just pretend that there is more than 3 tables referencing T.
-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `mydb`.`T`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`T` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`) )
ENGINE = InnoDB;
-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `mydb`.`S`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`S` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
`thing` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`t` INT NOT NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ,
INDEX `fk_S_T` (`id` ASC) ,
CONSTRAINT `fk_S_T`
FOREIGN KEY (`id` )
REFERENCES `mydb`.`T` (`id` )
ON DELETE NO ACTION
ON UPDATE NO ACTION)
ENGINE = InnoDB;
-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `mydb`.`A`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`A` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
`T` INT NOT NULL ,
`stuff` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`bar` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`foo` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ,
INDEX `fk_A_T` (`T` ASC) ,
CONSTRAINT `fk_A_T`
FOREIGN KEY (`T` )
REFERENCES `mydb`.`T` (`id` )
ON DELETE NO ACTION
ON UPDATE NO ACTION)
ENGINE = InnoDB;
-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `mydb`.`B`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`B` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
`T` INT NOT NULL ,
`stuff2` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`foobar` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`other` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ,
INDEX `fk_A_T` (`T` ASC) ,
CONSTRAINT `fk_A_T`
FOREIGN KEY (`T` )
REFERENCES `mydb`.`T` (`id` )
ON DELETE NO ACTION
ON UPDATE NO ACTION)
ENGINE = InnoDB;
-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `mydb`.`C`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`C` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
`T` INT NOT NULL ,
`stuff3` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`foobar2` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
`other4` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ,
INDEX `fk_A_T` (`T` ASC) ,
CONSTRAINT `fk_A_T`
FOREIGN KEY (`T` )
REFERENCES `mydb`.`T` (`id` )
ON DELETE NO ACTION
ON UPDATE NO ACTION)
ENGINE = InnoDB;
