如何在SQL数据库中存储我的自定义对象

Question

I have a class Account which has a name, email address, phone number and ArrayList of Vehicles, where Vehicles is another class with Strings make, model and int year. I want to store Accounts in a database. I am able to store the name, email address and phone number with no problems, but am unsure how to store the ArrayList of Vehicles. The two options i found from looking online were JSONObject/Array and serialization. However, I failed to convert the JSONObject back to my Vehicle Object when bringing it back out of the database. And serialization I didn't fully understand and couldn't find much online. It seemed all the tutorials serialized objects to files and not databases. Any help on either method to store my data in the database would be helpful, or a better way of doing it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If the Vehicles can only associated with a single Account, then I'd add the Account as a foreign key to the Vehicles table (assuming you have a Vehicles table, if not you'll need to create one).

If Vehicles can be associated with multiple accounts then I'd make an intermediary table that tracks the relationships between Accounts and Vehicles, so it would just have two fields: account_id, vehicle_id. (Once again requiring a Vehicles table)

I suppose you could serialize the ArrayList and store it in a field on the Accounts table...but that doesn't seem like a clean solution to me.