#community-help

Best Way to Manage User Favorites in a Video App

TLDR Jesse asked about effectively managing user favorite videos in an app. Kishore Nallan suggested using collection joins set to be supported in their next version.

2mo

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Jul 28, 2023 (2 months ago)

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Jesse

03:01 AM

Hi all,

I am wanting to know if storing a large number of strings in an array is bad for an application like this?

Let’s say that I have a video app, and I want the users to be able to favorite videos, then to later be able to search their favorites, would this be the best option?

I was thinking of creating a separate collection for each user with their favorites, but this could be bad as evetime the video is updated (or even deleted), I would have to update it in every user’s collection (if I have 1,000,000 users favorite a video, and the title changes, I would have to update 1,000,000 times - once for each collection).

Image 1 for Hi all,

I am wanting to know if storing a large number of strings in an array is bad for an application like this?

Let’s say that I have a video app, and I want the users to be able to favorite videos, then to later be able to search their favorites, would this be the best option?

I was thinking of creating a separate collection for each user with their favorites, but this could be bad as evetime the video is updated (or even deleted), I would have to update it in every user’s collection (if I have 1,000,000 users favorite a video, and the title changes, I would have to update 1,000,000 times - once for each collection).

Photo of md5-4e872368b2b2668460205b409e95c2ea

Kishore Nallan

11:53 AM

👋 We support collection joins in the next version so that's probably the best way to model this. Store the favorites in a separate collection and you can join them at query time.

See here: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/229#issuecomment-1645573572

Jesse

09:05 PM

This is Awesome! I can't wait for it to be released!

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