Question

I have the following tables:

users (id,name)
items (id,title)
users_items (user_id,item_id)

users and items should be pretty self explanatory. users_items holds whether a user has “favourited” an item. So if user with id 5 has favourited item with id 7, the users_items table will hold the record (5,7) for user_id and item_id respectively.

I want to be able to output all items, but state next to each one, whether the currently logged in user has favourited that item.

Obviously, I could just get all the items and then loop over them and do a separate mysql call to see if any rows are returned from users_items with the relevant user id and lesson id, but is there a nicer way to do this in 1 function. Maybe with some fancy join?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM items LEFT JOIN users_items ON items.id=users_items.item_id AND user_id=1 -- change user_id

In PHP, the next step would be to just check whether it evaluates as true or not:

if ($row['item_id'])
{
    // Yes
}
else {
    // No
}