System for keeping track of user favorites
On my website, I have a table movies and a table users
I'm trying to have an "Add to favs" button that a user can click, which will add that movie to his favorites (ajax / javascript not necessary at the moment, just php).
So what's the simplest way I could do something like that? I've thought about this but I can't seem to find a solution (all I think of is way too complicated, and in my opinion not possible).
What's your thoughts?
I don't need a ready-made script, just an idea that could get me working (although if you have an example of such script, I'd be happy to look at it).
Thanks!
Answer
This is a many-to-many relationship. A user can favorite many movies, and a movie can be favored by many users. In an RDBMS, you represent a many-to-many relationship with a third table. I call this an intersection table but it goes by other names too.
Create a table with two columns. The columns are both foreign keys, referencing movies and users, respectively.
CREATE TABLE Favorites (
user_id INT NOT NULL,
movie_id INT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (user_id, movie_id),
FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES Users(user_id),
FOREIGN KEY (movie_id) REFERENCES Movies(movie_id)
);
When a user chooses to favorite a movie:
INSERT INTO Favorites (user_id, movie_id) VALUES (?, ?)
When a user decides they don't like a movie any longer, delete the corresponding row:
DELETE FROM Favorites WHERE (user_id, movie_id) = (?, ?)
To get the set of movies favored by a given user:
SELECT movie_id FROM Favorites WHERE user_id = ?
To get the set of users who favor a given movie:
SELECT user_id FROM Favorites WHERE movie_id = ?
Regarding one of your comments:
You shouldn't make the "Add to favorite" a link. Indexers like Google will follow links, and then before you know it, every user has favorited every movie.
The general best practice is that read-only operations can be GET requests, while operations that write to the database can be POST requests. This means that you need to use a <form> element to submit POST requests, not an <a href="..."> element.