I am building an admin site for my brother's property management company. The design seems pretty straight forward.
I need a database with tables to store:
Estates. Each estate has a number or properties (flats or houses). Each property has a number of charges (service charge, water bills, maintenance ect.)
Then I have: Owners. Each Owner must have ONE or MORE properties. Owners make payments. Each payment is allocated to ONE or MORE charges.
From there I add CRUD functionality and the ability to produce reports by estate, property and/or owner.
Being new to Drupal I originally thought that the way to do this is create a content-type for each of the tables (e.g Estate, property, charge, owner, payment) and then use the relations module to enforce any foreign keys and automatic additions and update.
However, I have spent this week reading pro drupal development 7 and now I see I can build the database using the schema module and add functionality through the database abstraction layer with the functions declared in database.inc
.
Does anyone have an opinion on which is the best way forward? Or am I missing the point a bit? Do I use them both?
Thanks for any advice and Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays, whichever you prefer)