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So I'm creating a very simple project/task management application in Laravel 4 and I'm not sure how these relationships would work. I have a Project, Task and User model. A User can own a Project or be a member of a Project. A Task belongs to a User and a Project.

What is the best way to define the User/Project relationship? I could have a many to many relationship from User to Project and use a project_user pivot table to associate the two. If I wanted to determine if a User owned the project I could add a field to Project called owner and populate it with the id of the User who created it. This seems kind of wrong though as this relationship would normally be modeled in a belongs to relationship?

Any advice is greatly appreciated :)

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As you describe it Project and User have two relations. One for the ownership and one for the membership. The first is a one-to-many relationship, the second a many-to-many relationship.

Adding the owner to the Project and filling it with the user id is simply the way to express that first relationship as a foreign key.

Whether an owner needs to belong to the project as a member as well is a different business rule entirely and would probably need to be modelled as a constraint on the owner field, or by a trigger adding the owner as the first member immediately and adding constraints to ensure that the owner cannot be deleted from the membership pivot table.

You could add an "is_owner" flag to the pivot table, but I would advise against that. Though it makes it easier to enforce an "owner must be member" rule (if applicable), it is less flexible, feels unnatural and that would require logic/triggers to ensure that there is always only one owner. It would also require a join to figure out who the owners of the projects are, whereas with the owner field on the projects table, that is a very straightforward query.

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  • I've been investigating the possibility of having a separate Role model and tying the three together in a pivot table with user_id, project_id, and role_id columns. What are your thoughts on this approach and how do I best tackle this in Laravel 4.1? Commented Feb 15, 2014 at 18:36
  • Sorry, not familiar with Laravel. As to tying the three together in a pivot table, I would wait with that until you are further along and the need for it really becomes apparent. I have not yet come across situations where an owner field didn't suffice. Or, in other words, where the need for the owner to be a member needed to be enforced by the database. These things are often better left to "organisational enforcement" and not putting the constraints in the database also ensures that your software then doesn't have to deal with other, often complex, organisational issues. Commented Feb 15, 2014 at 18:40

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