I'm looking for help with part of a database design.
I have to Model the Database for a Group of Contacts and a Group of Distribution Lists.
Each Contact can be in many Distribution Lists and each Distribution List can have many Contacts. In a normal Instance, I could use a Junction table to achieve this solution.
But there's one more thing to add. Contacts have the option to receive notifications via two different methods which are SMS or Email.
A Contact can request to be sent notification via either or both methods.
The piece of the problem that I am stuck with, is that a Contact may wish to receive notifications differently depending on the specific distribution list.
So we have a problem like this :--
CONTACT A is in DL-A - Receives Notification via SMS
CONTACT A is in DL-B - Recieves Notification via Email & SMS.
I'm trying to avoid having more than one entry for a Contact in my Contacts Table, each contact should be unique.
Can Anyone help?
You could use another junction table:
contactid, distributionlistid, messagepreference
Messagepreference can be email or SMS. Two rows if they want both. New messaging types can be added with no changes to the DB. To be safe, use constants in your code to represent the values you will put into the columns.
Or, add sendemail and sendsms columns to the original junction table, but this has the drawback that you have to change DB structure if you introduce a new messaging type.
So you can add to fields in the junction table:
ContactsDistributions(ContactId, DistributionId, SMSFlag, EmailFlag)
in order to specify the type of notification choosen by the contact for each distribution.
You can add one more field in junction table which will represent how given contact will receive notification from given distribution list.
In this case I would add two fields to the junction table SMS and email both boolean and set to true if and only if they wish to receive notification in that matter. This allows the notifications to be set differently for combination list and contact.
Also depending on how you want to deal with removal from lists you could add a constraint on the junction table so that at least one of the two fields is true so that a notification is always sent although say in google groups I do have access to some lists which I have chosen not to get notifications from.
Related
Anyone know if it's possible to retrieve the customer name related to a transaction from the API?
I see it under "Paid by" if I follow the "payment_url" in the connect v1 https://connect.squareup.com/v1/{{location_id}}/payments/{{payment_id}} endpoint but can't see to find it anywhere else
Background: I'm working on a ticketing system that breaks out items by item_category so a kitchen gets only food items and the bar gets only drink items.
I have queues and itemized tickets by category BUT I can't seem to find the customer's name anywhere
You'll need to utilize the V2 Transactions API. When you call ListTransactions or RetrieveTransaction (ListTransactions), the Transaction object will have an array of Tenders, tenders, which has a field called customer_id. With this id, you will be able to pass it to RetrieveCustomer (RetrieveCustomer) to find out their name. Note that if you're not explicitly filling out their name, the name might not be available (an "instant profile" (Instant Profiles) will be created with whatever information can be retrieve from the card used to pay).
Update: Alternatively, as suggested by #Dan, would be to strip the payment_url from a V1 RetrievePayment (RetrievePayment) which includes the transaction_id at the end of the URL: https://squareup.com/dashboard/sales/transactions/TRANSACTION_ID. This is more efficient as you won't need to loop through transactions, and allow you to send it straight to RetrieveTransaction.
I am trying to create a simple private conversation between two users. I've tried following some examples but all i can find is for multiple users in multiple conversations and more complex versions. My endgoal is for simply be able to do $user->conversations->messages to get all my conversations and their messages that has been sent between two users.
I only need some help with the structure and relation between the tables to easily find correct conversation for each user and the messages connected to the conversation.
I currently have 3 models for this.
User Model
Conversation Model
PrivateMessages Model
My tables currently look like this but i think i need to do some changes to them also.
users:
id
name
conversations:
id
private_messages:
id
sent_by
sent_to
body
read_at
conversation_id
I'm making a game involving the user's contacts, but need a way to uniquely identify each contact. This is because the user can easily change the name, phone number, or other property of a given contact. Is there a way to do this?
You can use ABRecordGetRecordID() to get the unique ID of a record. It returns an ABRecordID which is a typedef for int32_t.
ABRecordGetRecordID() is the API that you can use. However, apple documentation does states some noteworthy points about the ABRecordID returned by this API.
Every record in the Address Book database has a unique record identifier. This identifier always refers to the same record, unless that record is deleted or the data is reset. Record identifiers can be safely passed between threads. They are not guaranteed to remain the same across devices.
The suggested method as per apple guidelines is
The recommended way to keep a long-term reference to a particular record is to store the first and last name, or a hash of the first and last name, in addition to the identifier. When you look up a record by ID, compare the record’s name to your stored name. If they don’t match, use the stored name to find the record, and store the new ID for the record.
In my app, I am also checking for creation date of the contact since the name against the ABRecordID could have been changed by the user. Creation date of a contact DOES NOT change upon device reset.
Though I have pasted most of the content here, its always advised to read the documentation
Scenario 1
In my web application say for there is a screen for adding an employee to system. As soon as user tabs after entering name of the employee, it generates the employee code automatically (which is the next field) based on some logic and already present records in the database.
Now I want to expose rest API for this application so that third party devs can build on top of it. So, I will have a resource called as /Employee which will respond for GET, PUT and DELETE verbs. But when a client needs to autofill the code, which is a GET operation, it will be on what resource? Should I make a new resource /EmployeeCodeFor/{Name} or I should get it on /Employee/{Name}/GenerateCode? If I go with /Employee/{Name}/GenerateCode then what about my resource to GET, PUT and DELETE for Employee i.e. actually /Employee/{Id}?
Scenario 2
Here lets take the case of a stackoverflow post. So lets say the resource would be /Post/{Id}. In the same way as in the previous example it lists me possible duplicate question as soon as I tab out of the Title field.
Again on what URL I should get those possible duplicates?
I can't think of more scenarios just now. But many such kind of scenarios may come up in real life application development. How to implement them in RESTful way?
Update on scenario 1
Code and Id are two different fields. Id is primary key, code can be duplicate across departments just to illustrate. Also to generate a code, name should be provided first. So, if user types a name "FirstName LastName" then server might generate FL003 as code assuming that there are already two more employees with firstname starting from F and lastname starting from L in the said department. Department can be identified based on the logged in user.
One way to allow the server an opportunity to pre-fill a bunch of elements in a new resource is to do
POST /Employees
{with empty body}
=>
201 Created
Location: http://example.org/employee/3443
<Employee Id="3443">
<Code>E1001</Code>
<FirstName></FirstName>
<LastName></LastName>
</Employee>
This gives the server one chance to provide default values. If you are looking for a more interactive way for the server to provide feedback during the input, I have another approach but it will take quite a bit more explaining.
Scenario 1
Let say your employee code is a unique identifier. In this case, to get it, you would allow the user to complete any field for the new employee and then make a POST. The server would generate the code and respond to the POST with a link to /Employee/{generated_code} which is the record for your newly created employee.
A GET on /Employee would return a list of all employees. A GET on /Employee/{a_code} will give you the employee detail.
Scenario 2
You could have some kind of query on the /Post collection like /Post?title_like={question_title}. A GET /Post?title_like=REST How to would return you a list of all questions containing "REST How to".
I'm currently logging all actions of users and want to display their actions for the people following them to see - kind of like Facebook does it for friends.
I'm logging all these actions in a table with the following structure:
id - PK
userid - id of the user whose action gets logged
actiondate - when the action happened
actiontypeid - id of the type of action (actiontypes stored in a different table - i.e. following other users, writing on people's profiles, creating new content, commenting on existing content, etc.)
objectid - id of the object they just created (i.e. comment id)
onobjectid - id of the object they did the action to (i.e. id of the content that they commented on)
Now the problem is there are several types of actions that get logged (actiontypeid).
What would be the best way of retrieving the data to display to the user?
The easiest way out would be gabbing the people the user follows dataset and then just go from there and grab all other info from the other tables (i.e. the names of the users the people you're following just started following, names of the user profiles they wrote on, etc.). This however would create a a huge amount of small queries and trips to the database in a while loop. Not a good idea.
I could use joins to retrieve everything in one massive data set, but how would I know where to grab the data from in just one query? - there's different types of actions that require me to look into several different tables to retrieve data, based on the actiontypeid...
i.e. To get User X is now following User Y I'd have to get my data (User Y's username) from the followers table, whereas User X commented on content Y would need me to look in the content table to get the content's title and URL.
Any tips are welcome, thanks!
Consider creating several views for different actiontypeids. Union them to have one full history.