Designing a "friend's list" function

[dxdolar]

Trying to figure out the structure of how to design a friend's list type feature. Right now I have ways of going about it (please enlighten me if there are others)

 

1: user a column, labeled 'friends' in a users table and populate it with a text string of user_id's, i.e.

friends

2, 3, 4, 5, 6,

to update it just add on a new number to the string, to delete it :shrug, I don't know really...haha:

 

2: use a friend's junction table with individual relationships, my ID and my friend's ID. i. e.

id1      id2

1    |    2

1    |    3

 

I've been programming with PHP for about 2 weeks now, I've devoured a lot of the basic concepts and now I'm trying to move away from the examples in my book.

 

Any help in figuring out the design would be appreciate. Plus any guidance on how to execute that design, or links to code I can use as a reference, or tuts, would also be a HUGE help. Thanks everyone!

[trq]

The second method you describe is how I would do it simply becasue having a string of comma seperated values stored in one field makes it that much more difficult to search via mysql.

[dxdolar]

to account for growth potential (thousands of members) is that still the best way?

 

that was the way that I would have preferred to do it anyway.

[trq]

Yep, still the best way.