User settings mechanism for Yii

Question

Hi guys!

I need some help with user settings mechanism for my Yii-based application.

I've created the following db structure to store user settings:

1. table user with the following fields

   id | username | email | etc.

2. table settingslist (to store a list of all possible settings with descriptions) with the following fields

   id | code | name | description

3. table settings (to store all user settings) with the following fields

   id | userid | settingslistcode | value

Now I'm stuck with the form which allows user to change his settings. I had to deal before with the regular models (i.e. for posts, comments, etc.) where every new model had only one row in the database (Post model - id | title | body |) with the certain amount of attributes (fields of the table). But now I need to store user settings in 10-15 rows and I don't know how to apply Yii model mechanism to work with this, so I can retrieve those settings in a single form (so user could change his preferences).

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Not sure what the criteria are for your form, but you can pull all of the settings for a particular user with the following.

$criteria=new CDbCriteria;
$criteria->condition="id=".$user->id;
$settings=Settings::model()->findAll($criteria);

Then loop through each of these building your form.

foreach($settings as $setting){
    $criteria->condition="code=".$settings->settingslistcode;
    $settingElement = SettingsList::model()->find($criteria);
    ...
}

Answer 2

Well, I m not sure if you store user setting for his profile in your site or per post/comment.

The setting list is OK, we need to define all the possible setting options. Then, if you store site settings for your users, try a column ProfileSettings in tbl users. I usually use serialize($setting_array()).

If you store user setting per post, create a user_post_settings table and user same serialize() idea. So, one user - one post => one row.