Comment items from different tables

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Hi there,

Please could you help me to build my database structure ?

I would like to create an app in which users can leave comments associated with items from different tables.

For example, there would be several tables: Movies, Books, Characters. Users could comment multiple times on each item in these tables.

Regarding the data structure, I was thinking of two solutions:

  • A single “Comments” table that references the different tables. But in this case, I don’t understand how to use the “ispartof” function. Indeed if I delete an element, I would like the associated comments to be deleted as well so as not to keep data unnecessarily.

  • Create several comment tables for each element (Comments_Movies, Comments_Books, etc). But in this case, will I be able to create a view that displays all the comments from these different tables?

Or is it a mixture of these two solutions with a main table containing all the comments and an intermediate table created separately for each type of item ?

Sorry if this is a basic question regarding data structure, I’m a newbie.

2

Single comment table. Don’t use ispartof at all. Set up Bots to delete the comments when a parent record is deleted. Although I don’t know why you would be deleting any records, why not just keep them?

2 Likes
3

Thanks for your answer !

I would like to delete records so as not to keep useless data which could slow down the application.