creating a forum using asp & access. your ideas ???

[akgd99]

Hi ,
I am planning to create a forum for my site. I shall be using ASP with windows 2000. Can you help with the basic ideas about creation of a forum ?

1. DESIGN ASPECTS.
2. DATA STORAGE ASPECTS.
3. LINKS BETWEEN THE QUERIES AND ALL RELATED RESPONSES ETC.
I am not looking for DETAIL details of the process but a
starting step for my mission.

should the data be stored in a DB or in XML format etc.
Please recommend me your thoughts about what should be the best possible way to implement a forum.

I am planning to develop the whole module by myself.
regards
akgd99

 

[Tarwn]

I started thinking about possibly doing something similiar to this, but ran out of time. The XML vs DB question I decided on db. XML is great stuff, I love using it, but how are you going to decide what gets stored in which file? Do you create one file for the whole forum? Thats a lot of processor work for parsing when it gets largish. A new file for each thread? How do we show someone the index of all the threads. An index file and thread files? Do we update the index file everytime we add to the thread file (replies, etc), extra parsing yet again. I have seen XML driven forums out there, but I still think the DB is the way to go. You can create a relatively simple database with just a few tables to drive your whole forum.
(On the fly db design)

Subjects - for thread subjects
subject_id
subject_name
subject_description

Threads - holds the intial post for a new thread
thread_id
subject_id - maps to subject_id in Subjects table
thread_creator - maps to user_id in user table
thread_subject
thread_text
thread_date

ThreadReplies - holds all replies to threads
reply_id
thread_id - maps to thread_id in threads to show ownership
reply_creator - maps to user_id in user table
reply_text
reply_date

User - holds users
user_id
user_name
user_email
user_password
user_fullname
join_date
last_login_date

That should give you a start, all of your threads can be grouped by subject, all of your replies can be grouped by thread, you can do counts on those as well as last date user posted a thread AND last date they posted a relpy, you can also count threads started and threads replied to. You could also add a user_prefernces table to let users select a starting forum to see, a favorites list, so on.

Hope that helps a little, and remember, this was on the fly, so not necessarilly 100%
-Tarwn
On-the-fly? Is that related to flies and ointment?

 

[harmmeijer]

If you want to do a cross post you have to change some of the desing:

Threads - holds the intial post for a new thread
thread_id
subject_id - maps to subject_id in Subjects table
thread_creator - maps to user_id in user table
thread_subject
thread_text
thread_date

ThreadReplies - holds all replies to threads
reply_id
thread_id - maps to thread_id in threads to show ownership

Replies
reply_text
reply_creator - maps to user_id in user table
reply_date

Check the codecharge site, there is a forum example applictaion you can download.

 

[Tarwn]

Thanks for the changes, I didn't think of cross posting when I was writing that, nice fix for it I would also add one more thing though,

ThreadReplies - holds all replies to threads
tr_id - arbitrary id for easier referencing
reply_id
thread_id - maps to thread_id in threads to show ownership

Replies
reply_id - unique id maps to ThreadReplies.reply_id
reply_text
reply_creator - maps to user_id in user table
reply_date

Also, didn't notice before, but the underline for primary keys is apparently killing my underscores, assume that you can see the underscore between the words
-Tarwn