How to implement sharing ability in a Spring web app?

Question

Kind of a higher level question here.I've got a web application that is fairly simple. There are three seperate "objects" in the application. A Filter, an Authorization, and a Job. Each Job has to have a Filter and an Authorization to run.

Now a user of this application can create any of these objects and they are all linked to that specific user. Now however, the requirements state that they'd like to implement sharing. So a user can share their created items with other users. Honestly I'm just not sure of the best method to implement such a feature and am hoping someone can provide some ideas.

In the DB, each record has a user column that identifies the user who created it. I initially thought of adding a shareUser column, but that wouldn't really work since each record could be shared with multiple users. I'm just not sure the best way to tie these all together. Do I need an entirely new table in the DB that link's users to shared records?

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Yes, you do need a new table for each type of record you need to be "owned". You should use cross reference tables for this case.

something like:

userFilter
 - userId
 - filterId

If a user can only share a record they exist, you should have a createdByUserId column on the particular table.