NYCPHP Meetup

[David Mintz]

[Not PHP-specific, but we all know the greatest minds in town are here, so
---]

Here's my dilemma. For reasons a little too boring and involved to go into
here, I have split the thing called User into two tables, one called
'people' that holds firstname, lastname, email, and other personal data. The
'users' table holds username, password, last_login timestamp, etc. Both
tables have a boolean 'active' so that I can disable user accounts and mark
people as, well, inactive and only interesting for historical reasons.

I want to provide a self-service user registration, with an email
verification thing. They submit their data, we email them a link to verify
that they control the email address they provided, bla bla, then the account
is enabled. So I thought I would go ahead and do the inserts, marking both
new records as 'inactive' pending email confirmation.

In some cases, though, there may already be a row in people corresponding to
the new user. If I attempt the insert and the email already exists I will
get a duplicate email error. But if I instead run an update on the
already-existing row, I will have done the update without first verifying
the email. I am therefore thinking that the pending person/user rows maybe
ought to be stored somewhere else temporarily. I am even thinking, maybe
serialize much of the person and user details, perhaps as JSON, since it's
just being crammed away temporarily pending verification.

What would you do?

Gratefully yours....



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--
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/
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