# How to enable application user "favorite" field
**URL:** https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714
**Category:** Application Builder
**Tags:** app-builder, help-wanted, use-case
**Created:** [July 14, 2025, 5:37am UTC](https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714 "2025-07-14T05:37:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@britastic](https://community.baserow.io/u/britastic)
#### Post date: [July 14, 2025, 5:37am UTC](https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714/1 "2025-07-14T05:37:52Z")
I’m looking for a way that site users, when logged in, can save or bookmark specific rows.
I assume this could be done through creating a column that links the user table with the target table and then including a checkbox in the item’s detail page that can be checked and unchecked by the user if they want to save it.
Multiple users have to be able to have different rows saved; is it possible to have a user-specific input like this, or will whatever they submit overwrite whatever is in that linked column?
Please advise on the best way to set this up.
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### Author:  [@cwinhall](https://community.baserow.io/u/cwinhall)
#### Post date: [July 14, 2025, 5:44am UTC](https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714/2 "2025-07-14T05:44:31Z")
You are spot on with your assessment. Unfortuantely, you cannot add a record to a linked table, it would simply overwrite it.
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### Author:  [@britastic](https://community.baserow.io/u/britastic)
#### Post date: [July 14, 2025, 3:43pm UTC](https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714/3 "2025-07-14T15:43:05Z")
Yeah, I couldn’t make it happen the way I had it set up.
I did figure something else out though that seems to be working.
I will try to explain through the use case, which is a website that allows logged in users to bookmark books to save to a list.
The easy solution was to create a table that connects the user table with the books table. It has columns for each table links, lookup columns for row IDs, a “last modified” column, and a rating column with just 1 flag (either it’s flagged or not). The label column is a formula that combines the book row ID with the user ID into one number string.
On the book details page I had to add 2 buttons - one to create a record in the Bookmarked Books table with the flag added; and another button to remove the bookmark.
That was the easy part.
I needed a way to show whether the currently viewed book was already bookmarked, so I added a single flag rating (not input) and had to experiment with how to show the current user’s flag status without an error message appearing upon the page load if the book wasn’t currently flagged by the user.
-I had to setup a data source for the page as follows:
list multiple rows, local baserow, bookmarked books table, no filters, with search parameter parameter\>ID User\>ID (these combined were the label for each row)
-The flag rating value setup to show data source\>book-user bookmark\>-0\>bookmarked (IE, the first row in a list)
It’s possible I missed something and it’s still not going to work once I really try to use it but for now it seems to be doing the trick.
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### Author:  [@jeandavid](https://community.baserow.io/u/jeandavid)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2026, 5:55pm UTC](https://community.baserow.io/t/how-to-enable-application-user-favorite-field/10714/4 "2026-09-18T17:55:35Z")
Hello !
Have you managed to make this work ?
In my setup, I have relation table used for favorites (the same as bookmarks here). I was able to “bookmark” an item from its page, show when it’s bookmarked and have the possibility to remove the bookmark if any.
This was possible with:
- a table having only a link to table users field (user\_ref) and a link to table items field (item\_ref)
- an item page with the id as url parameter
- a data source ds\_list\_bookmarks on this page which list the relation table with two filter (`user_ref has user > id` and `item_ref has parameter > id`)
- two buttons with visibility conditions for logged in users and:
- for the button to create a bookmark: `is_empty(ds_list_bookmarks)`
- for the button to remove the bookmark: `is_empty(ds_list_bookmarks)=false`
- Both buttons refresh the data source.
It works well without error message, logged in or logged out (there was an error when I tried the get a single row data source. I did not use search (that I do understand and doc about it seems out of date as I don’t have these options but just a formula field: [Data sources in Baserow Application Builder](https://baserow.io/user-docs/data-sources#search-data)
Now I am on the next step for that: trying to enable user to bookmark and unbookmark an item from the list of items, instead of having to navigate to each item. And I don’t see how to do that.
I have tried this on another page:
- list items
- list bookmarks with filter `user_ref has user > id`
- repeat items, in each repetition, have the same two buttons I used on the item page, and it gets tricky here:
- it’s easy to create a bookmark row from an item
- deleting it requires to define the id of the row, but how could I set the formula to get the bookmark row id from? I assume I cannot search wwithin my bookmarks list from there…
- setting visibility is not working too: I have tried something like `contains(data records > ds_list_bookmarks > All > user_ref > All > id , User > id)` but it doesn’t work, I guess because this is a text function while I would like to search an array…
Any idea how to achieve that?