Insert into Mysql from form Suggestions?

rayge

Im just looking for suggestions on whats the best way to take someones Birthday and put it into a dbase.

The Birthday part of the form is like this.
MONTH - Dropdown field
DAY - Dropdown Field
Year - Text field.

SHould I make these all seperate fields in teh dbase or combine the MONTH DAY YEAR into some sort of string then insert it into teh dbase? and if #2 is the best HOW do you do that? Thanks for any help.

Anon

It is really up to you but probably the most common way would be to combine them back together using some fo the string fucntionality ($dob = $Year."-".$month."-".$day😉

rayge

What about setting up the field in mysql to handle it? Just do varchar? or what?

rayge

And oh yeah.. since this isnt a required field. if they dont put anything in how can i make it NULL? When i print $dob it shows it like -0-0 where it should be Nothing.

maybe somthing like if dob = -0-0 then dob = NULL?

And if so whats the code to make that actually work? Thanks

bfinucan

Hello,
In MySQL use the data type of DATE [YYYY-MM-DD] or TIMESTAMP(8) [YYYYMMDD]. I prefer TIMESTAMP.

In your select statement use (example uses birthday as the field name and an American format date as you return value):

IF(birthday, DATE_FORMAT(birthday, '%M %e, %Y'), '') AS birthday

You'll have to handle assigment of NULL values in your code prior to entry in your DB.

rayge

kewl I can do that. I didnt notice your repley and i posted another new message asking how to get the Current age of someone accuratly but i would like to ask you as well.. I know that I would be taking out the "-" in this code if i use timestamp so considering that:

I have 2 Lines of code here one that gets their birthday from a form and then one for todays DATE.

<? $dob = $month."-".$day."-".$year; ?>
<? $today = date("m-d-Y"); ?>

What i HAVE to do is make sure that the User signing up is 13years of age or older..

How can i accuratly Determine that information?

Thanks for any assistance!