How to model a many-to-many relationship where each relation has additional "relation data"?

[Jonas L]

Hi,

I'm trying to get the grip of the document structure instead of the relational one.

In this case, I have companies and users with a many-to-many relation between them.

public class User {
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
}

public class Company {
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}




For each user a company has, a license is required and assigned on a "day-to-day" basis. The company can lock the users as well so that they cannot login. I guess I would need something like this inside each company:

"Users": [
    {
        "Id": "users/1",
        "LicenseValidUntil": "2014-02-28T....Z",
        "Locked": false
    },
    {
        "Id": "users/4",
        "LicenseValidUntil": "2014-03-10T....Z",
        "Locked": false
    }
]

Each user can be in multiple companies so ValidUntil and Locked is not specific to the user, but the user-company combination. I'm not quite sure how to model this. It doesn't feel right to create a denormalized reference with properties not found on the user entity - or is it?

Suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

[Oren Eini (Ayende Rahien)]

You would have a CompanyUser collection in the company that contains that information.

Oren Eini

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[Kijana Woodard]

Yes. Model the relationship explicitly as a document or part of a doc, as Oren suggested, rather than implying on either side.

[Jonas L]

Thank you! And to get all companies a user is in, I would use an index?

[Kijana Woodard]

Yes. Or maintain list that on the User doc.

Assuming Company and User docs are in the same db, you can do that transactionally when handling to the Add/RemoveCompany command(s).