controlling the select statement?

[maliskoleather]

Im not too sure if this is truly possible, but I'm trying to find a way to control the field selected, based of the value of another field... for example:

(SELECT friend_id AS friend WHERE user_id='1') OR (SELECT user_id AS friend WHERE friend_id='1' AND mutual='y')

I know this dosent work as-is, and yes, i could just run two seperate queries, then join the results together, but i'd like to avoid repeating the code... I'm already making several large queries on this script, and would like to avoid any more...

any help would be greatly appreciated

[syber]

You could use the CASE statement

SELECT CASE  
   WHEN friend_id = '1' AND mutual = 'y' 
   THEN user_id 
   WHEN user_id = '1' 
   THEN friend_id 
   ELSE null 
  END CASE AS friend 
FROM table 

I included the ELSE clause to point out that you should allow for neither being true.