Consider table structure:
TABLE posts
post_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PK
cur_rev_id INT FK(revisions.rev_id)
TABLE revisions
rev_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PK
orig_post INT FK(posts.post_id)
post_text VARCHAR
Where the posts
table tracks non-versioned information about the post and its current revision, and revisions
tracks each version of the post text with a link back to the parent post. Because of the circular FK constraints you'd need to enclose new post insertions in a transaction.
With this you should be able to easily add, remove, track, roll back, and preview revisions to your posts.
Edit:
Yeah, enclosing in a transaction won't exactly help since the keys are set to AUTO_INCREMENT
, so you need to dip back in to PHP with LAST_INSERT_ID()
and some temporarily NULL indexes.
CREATE TABLE `posts` (
`post_id` INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`cur_rev_id` INT(10) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
`post_title` VARCHAR(50) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`post_id`),
INDEX `FK_posts_revisions` (`cur_rev_id`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB
CREATE TABLE `revisions` (
`rev_id` INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`orig_post` INT(10) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
`post_text` VARCHAR(32000) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`rev_id`),
INDEX `FK_revisions_posts` (`orig_post`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB
ALTER TABLE `posts`
ADD CONSTRAINT `FK_posts_revisions` FOREIGN KEY (`cur_rev_id`) REFERENCES `revisions` (`rev_id`);
ALTER TABLE `revisions`
ADD CONSTRAINT `FK_revisions_posts` FOREIGN KEY (`orig_post`) REFERENCES `posts` (`post_id`);
Then:
$db_engine->query("INSERT INTO posts (cur_rev_id, post_title) VALUES (NULL, 'My post Title!')");
$post_id = $db_engine->last_insert_id();
$db_engine->query("INSERT INTO revisions (orig_post, post_text) VALUES($post_id, 'yadda yadda')");
$rev_id = $db_engine->last_insert_id();
$db_engine->query("UPDATE posts SET cur_rev_id = $rev_id WHERE post_id = $post_id");