database design & relations for tourism web app

Question

I'm currently developing a web app on a travel & tourism website. What I'm willing to do is to allow the user to register himself to be able to book a tour for himself and/or family members. The 'family members' need not to register themselves. And the user should be able to cancel any member/himself from the booking. The tables I've designed so far are:

users id, name, password, email, phone, level (to distinguish between user & admin), dob (date of birth), status (active or blocked)

tours id, title, short_desc, start_date, end_date, max_passenger_capacity, fees, published (boolean), long_desc

passengers (for additional passengers who are not registered) id (PK), user_id (FK from users), name, age, sex, status

wallets (where users can deposit money and pay from) id (PK), user_id (FK from users), date_time, narration, ref_no, withdraw (float), deposit (float)

Now I intend to create an invoice table (id, date, user_id etc.), invoice_items table (id, invoice_id, etc. with reference to who is booking which tour for whom), passengers_booked table (id, tour_id, passenger_id etc. to keep track of which passenger is opting which tour).

The user should be able to cancel all the members from a tour or any member from the tour. In the later case an invoice should be raised quoting any refund and the other members should stay opted for the tour.

And how should manage the condition when the user is opting a tour for himself? And how to manage such invoice_items so that he can cancel himself?

I'm totally lost. Please help.

Answer 1

A few thoughts on users and invoices structures to hopefully get you back on track. You'll probably need to clarify your question regarding other aspects (e.g. refunds).

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To cope with users optionally being passengers, you could create a common people table, the people_id being a FK in both passengers and users. Hopefully, this should help keep your subsequent queries simpler and ease the processes whereby users become passengers, and possibly where passengers become registered users too. For example:

people: id (PK), name, dob, sex

users: id (PK), people_id, password, email, phone, level, status

passengers: id (PK), people_id (FK from people), status (as a passenger)

Notes:

• Would people.name be better as multiple fields (forename and surname)?
• You might consider email and phone better as fields on people rather than users (balancing redundancy against potential marketing)?
• Use dob consistently, rather than age (as this will require maintaining).
• You might think about how you keep entries on the people table unique to help prevent duplicates being added for the same person.

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With respect to Invoices and Refunds section, I'm not entirely sure what is required from the fragment you posted. Consider the following:

invoice: id (PK), invoice_date, user_id, tour_id, invoice_amount

passengers_booked: id (PK), tour_id, passenger_id

wallets: id (PK), user_id (FK from users), transaction_date_time, narration, invoice_no NULL (FK to invoice), ref_no, transaction_amount (float)

Notes:

• I'm not sure what your intention was for invoice_detail, as you know who's booking for whom by joining invoice and passengers_booked on tour_id.
• Refunds would be handled by posting any refund amount to the relevant wallet record.
• I've combined withdrawal and deposit into a single transaction_amount field to remove redundancy and ease the processing when, for example, calculating balances. The types can be distinguished using +ve and -ve values. [Although you may have accounting standards that mandate separate fields.]
• I've added invoice_no to wallet to track payments and refunds relating to a particular trip (but may be NULL for deposits/withdrawals). Similarly, ref_no may then be used when deposits/withdrawals into the wallet are received. [n.b. You might consider combining invoice_no and ref_no.]

Example

User U is booking for a tour T for himself and his family members A, B, C & D. And he also made the payment. Lets assume cost for tour T is $1000/passenger. So he made a payment of $5000.

The users table has a record for user U.
The tours table has a record for tour T.
The people table has 5 records for U, A, B, C, D.
The passengers table has 5 records.
The passengers_booked table has 5 records for tour T.
The invoice table has a record dated e.g. '1 Jan' for $5000 for tour T.
The wallet has a deposit record for $5000. The wallet also has a payment of -$5000 against our invoice.

Now he wishes to cancel the booking of B. And for that he will be refunded (suppose) $900 after cancellation charge.

The B record is removed from passengers_booked (but can be left on passengers for future use).
The invoice table is updated with revised date e.g. '8 Jan' and amount $4100.
The wallet table has a refund made to it against that invoice for $900.

Thus we use a single invoice which only holds the latest position.
You can check the latest invoice amount against the sum of wallet entries for that invoice, to see whether there is an amount outstanding or due for refund.

n.b. There are other ways to model this, e.g. use invoice as the summary as above but have multiple invoice_detail records to capture the detail on passenger changes. Depending on why you're doing this and how sophisticated it needs to be will determine which route is better for you.