Question

I am working on creating a favorites section on my website where users can simply store certain items in their favorites section for easy access. Each of the items are already well-defined and have multiple attributes. So my question is lets say I had 10,000 users and I would like to implement a ‘favorites’ system, what would be the best way to keep track of what favorite items have been added by each user?

I was thinking implementing this the following way: link each favorited item id to a username and then run a query for if the user with a particular username is logged in than retrieve all the favorited items by that username.

I appreciate any help with figuring out of a good way to do this. My goal is to store in a way that is later easy to retrieve and use the data and minimize redundant information.

Answer 1

It’s pretty easy, you need to create a new table with 3 fields:

id
favoriteID
userID

Every time a user adds a new favourite, it adds a new record to this table, storing both the ID of the favorite, and the ID of the user. There is no redundant information and it’s easy to retrieve the details of either the favorite or the user by implementing a join query. This is what relational databases are for.