I am in the processing of adding an “Online Status” for my Users, so when you look under the “Article Comments” section of my website, you will be able to see if a User is either…[INDENT]- Online and Active
Online but Idle
Offline[/INDENT]
I haven’t figured out the coding yet, but I will obviously need to compare a User’s “lastActivity” against the current time.
What would be the best Data Type in MySQL to use (e.g. DATETIME vs TIMESTAMP)?
And would it be better to work with MySQL’s Native Date/Time Format or use the Unix Format?
I’m with Rudy, it really doesn’t matter in either question you have post which choice you make. Pick the one you are comfortable with and go from there.
The field “last_activity” keeps track of the last time the User did something on my website (e.g. Logged In, Submitted a Form, Navigated to a New Page, etc)
If a User have had “activity” in the last 15 minutes then a green light appears next to their profile info when Comments are listed beneath an Article.
If the User has had 'activity" between 15 and 30 minutes then a yellow light appears next to their profile info when Comments are listed beneath an Article.
If the User has not had “activity” in the past 30 minutes then I treat them as “logged out” a gray light appears next to their profile info when Comments are listed beneath an Article.
I was told that would be easiest to do using PHP’s Unix Timestamp which is just the # of seconds isnce the Unix Epoch.
Converting a database type datetime value to a unix timestamp and then working with it is super easy:
$row = fetch_something_from_the_database_or_summots();
$ts = new DateTime($row['last_activity']);
echo $ts->format('m/d/Y H:i:s'); // outputs 03/07/2012 07:48
echo $ts->getTimestamp(); // outputs the unix timestamp
$ts->add(new DateInterval('P10D')); // add 10 days to the datetime thingy
echo $ts->format('m/d/Y H:i:s'); // outputs 03/17/2012 07:48
PHP is becoming more and more OO, you’ll have to dive in at some point. And to be honest, the examples above are a good starting points.
But the php.net page for DateTime also has procedural variations of the above, if you must.
As for the coloured thingies, you can use the strtotime() to convert a database datetime to a unix timestamp. If it’s only for this use, then it doesn’t really matter what format you save them in. But, since it’s a date and a time, might as well go for datetime!
As for the coloured thingies, you can use the strtotime() to convert a database datetime to a unix timestamp. If it’s only for this use, then it doesn’t really matter what format you save them in. But, since it’s a date and a time, might as well go for datetime!
But the last_activity is being set by PHP, and I thought that time() would give me the # of seconds from the Unix Epoch as an Integer. And then I could store that as an Integer and compare to to the current time() to see if the User should or should not drive.
If I wanted my script to capture now() and then save that as a DATETIME in the database, how would I do that?
Starting with PHP 4 some form of OOP was possible, since that time more and more work has gone into adding features that are typical and useful in other OOP languages. PHP (until 5.4) was only able to to single inheritance (an OOP concept); however that did not matter as much because many people overcame this by using composition (another OOP concept) which prior to 5.4 was possible. In 5.x Interfaces where added, ‘Magic’ features where improved and the memory stack management became a lot better for classes and other OOP constructs. In later 5.x releases Reflection (being able to look inside a class for its methods and properties) became possible - this is a very powerful feature. In 5.4 much of the lack of multiple inheritance has be circumvented by Traits which allow us to do a ‘copy and past’ of logic between classes. Also reflection has been improved. It is now quite possible to create a fairly elegant class based application with PHP. So like Immerse says ‘why not dive in’?
Sorry, I am getting lost in what this - my own - thread is about?! (Been a long week…)
In order to determine which color indicator to display for a User’s Online Status, I need to compare the User’s “last_activity” in MySQL with the current time when the User’s Comments are displayed.
I guess that could be done calculating the Time differences using either PHP or MySQL. (Personally, I’d prefer storing “last_activity” as a Date/Time Stamp so it is human-readable versus the Unix Time thingy.)
If I wanted to do everything in MySQL, what Data-Type should I choose - asked above - and how would I go about comparing the Current Time to what is stored in MySQL in whatever format that would be?!
I don’t understand what the difference is between DATETIME and TIMESTAMP.
now all you have to do is make the comparison in php after extracting the last activity value
you could also do it in the SELECT but that makes the query more clunky
I don’t know how to do that?!
That is why I was leaning towards the Unix Time, because then it is just subtracting two numbers.
How would I take a DATETIME value in my “last_activity” field in MySQL and compare it against the current time() and determine the difference in Minutes between the two?!
Sorry, but the more I read online the more I get confused on this topic…
well, this forum is online, so i don’t know if i give you any information whether that will confuse you further
but i am sure as shootin not going to read da manual for you
the difference between DATETIME and TIMESTAMP is in da manual
if you don’t like reading it online, may i suggest you print it off
calculating the difference between two datetimes in minutes is simple if you use one of more of the datetime functions (may i suggest TIMESTAMPDIFF, which is also documented in da manual)
come on, debbie, you can do it, show a little independence and self-sufficiency
