effecient way to store a buddy list...

chops

My site is a photoviewer site. People upload pics with all kinds of info (shutter/description/fstop/etc..) then the site creates folders and sets up preview pages for the pics. Another feature of the site im working on is a friends/buddy list. So you as the user can add people in your list then when you come back just pull up what friends are in your list then select whose photos you want to view.

My question is (using PHP/MySQL) what would be the best way to store the "friends" list in the database?...I was thinking one field in the users table called friends and then enter users like this: username1 | username2 | username3 | username4 .....using the "|" as a spearator for the usernames. Is this the best way to do this or is there an easier way im just not seeing yet?

Chad.

rodif_bl

that would suck for deleting....

well first off i hope you have a unique id for each user. if you do then you probally just do this.

Just create your table with

user_id - int
friend_id - int

chops

I do have a uniqID for each user (it is their username) but I am not sure I get what you mean by creating a table with friend_id - int ......how would I store more than one , access it, and also how would I delete from it?

toma42

The friends table would be a cross reference table with a primary key consisting of both columns. That way it's a 1:many with users and many:1 with users depending on how you look at it.

chops

I think that went a bit over my head....If you don't really feel like explaining it np. If you could point to me to an explaination or tutorial that would be great. This is actually my first MySQL DB and I am fairly confident but still not 100% fully understanding how to acomplish what you are talking about.

Chad.

toma42

http://sql.org/online_resources.html

Sounds like you need to learn SQL and database structures.

BTW, I should have refered to the users:xref_users (xref=user_id, friend_id table) as a many to many.