Scaffolding a Generic Admin - Part 2 - The Data Model

Before we can scaffold screens for our generic admin, we'll need a data model. Below is a E/R diagram for the trivia game data model, which contains the following entities: User, Theme, Category, Game, Question, Answer and Response. This is a simple data model with several one-to-many relationships and no many-to-many relationships.

Briefly, a Game has a parent User and Theme. A Question has a parent Game and Category. An Answer has a parent Question. And a Response has a parent User, Question and Answer.

There's nothing too complex about this data model, so I'll focus on the conventions used to name the table primary and foreign key attributes. Each table has a PK named simply "Id" and each foreign key is prefaced by the parent entity name and "Id". For example, the Game entity has foreign key attributes "ThemeId" and "UserId".

To keep things simple and perhaps facilitate reporting or statistics down the line, all PKs and FKs are of type integer.

You can download the enclosed sql scripts to create the tables in either MSSQL or MySQL format. I chose to create proper FK constraints for the tables. If you prefer not to use foreign keys, feel free to remove them from the sql prior to running the scripts.

Next, we'll look at an Illudium template for generating a service, controller and Transfer Object decorator to support create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations.