Storing Multiple Message in Database

[upp]

I need some advice, I'm not sure if this is the right section to post this or not but I'll give it a try. I am creating a website for a small group of people to be able to message back and forth. I ran into a problem when doing the whole reply to a message option. I dont want to have each individual message as a new entry in my database, and then look for each message in that conversation when loading the conversation, I thought about inserting something like +=+=+=+=+=+= in between messages in the conversation so that when i pull up that conversation i could just separate the messages into an array by looking for that +=+=+=+=+=+= in the string of text and separating all the messages out. I want to know if anyone knows a better way of doing this or if this is a good way to go. thanks for any suggestions.

[Pikachu2000]

Why would you want to do that? Storing each entry as its own record is the proper way to do it.

[laffin]

I have to agree with Pikachu on this, keep each msg seperate, add a replythread to field  and a loop which gets the the previous messages.
Pretty simple
pseudo code.

$replythread=$msg['replythread)

while(!empty($msg['replythread'])

{

    $next_msg=get_msg($replythread);

    if(!empty($next_msg))

    {

      $msg['body'].="+++++\n".$next_msg['body'];

      $replythread=$next_msg['replythread'];

  } else

      $replythread=0;

}

[/code]

 

another option is to store all the ids into replythread (as a string)

About the only bad thing of this method is that the field should be large enough to hold a very long list of ids.

 

pseudo code.

[/code]

$replythread=explode(',',$msg['replythread'])

foreach($replythread as $thread)

{

    $next_msg=get_msg($thread);

    $msg['body'].="+++++\n".$next_msg['body'];

    $replythread=$next_msg['replythread'];

}

[/code]