I have a tricky issue here with a registration of both a user and his/her pet. Both the user and the pet are treated as separate entities and both require separate registration forms. However, the user's pet has to be linked to the user via a foreign key in the database. The process is basically that when a new user joins the site, firstly they register their pet, then they register themselves. The reason for this order is to check their pet's eligibility for the site (there are some criteria to be met) first, instead of getting the user to sign up only to then find out their pet is ineligible. It is this ordering of the form submissions which is causing me a bit of a headache, as follows...
The site is being developed with an MVC framework, and the User registration process is managed via a method in a User_form controller, while the pet registration process is managed via a method in the Pet_form controller.
The pet registration form happens first, and the pet data can be saved without the owner_id at this stage, with the user id possibly being added (e.g by retrieving pet's id from session) following user registration. However, doing it this way could potentially result in redundant data, where pet records would be created in the database, but if the user doesn't actually register themselves too, then the pets will be ownerless records in the DB.
Other option is to serialize the new pet's data at the pet registration stage, don't save it to the DB until the user fills out their registration form. Once the user is created, i can pass serialised data AND the owner_id to a method in the Pet Model which can update the DB. However, I also need to set the newly created $pet to $this->pet which I then access for a sequence of other related forms. Should I just set the session variable in the model method? Then in the Pet controller constructor, do a check for pet stored in session, if yes, assign to $this->pet...
If this makes any sense to anybody and you have some advice, i'd be grateful to hear it!