将数组插入MYSQL字段

Question

For a forum, i want to enable the users to send messages to each other to. In order to do this, I made a table called Contacts, within this table I have 5 collumns: The user_id, a collumn for storing Friends, one for storing Family, one for storing Business and one for other contacts. These last four should all contain an array, which holds the user_id's of that type of contact. The reason I chose for this design is because I don't want to type an awful lot or limit the users on the amount of friends, like friend1, friend2 etc.

My question is: Is this correct how I do it? If not, what should be improved?And what type of MYSQL field should Friends, Family, Business and Other be?

Answer 1

Use the serialize() and unserialize() functions.

See this question on how to store an array in MySQL: Save PHP array to MySQL?

However, it's not recommended that you do this. I would make a separate table that stores all the 'connections' between two users. For example, if say John adds Ali, there would be a record dedicated to Ali and John. To find the friends of a user, simply query the records that have Ali or John in them. But that's my personal way of doing things.

I recommend that you query the users friends using PHP/MySQL all the time you need them. This could save considerable amount of space and would not take up so much speed.