Auto Deleting...

richard76

Dear Friends,
I have a news display module in my site. Its display the news according to the Admin's entry. Its fine. Now I want to allow selected users to add news in side my module.
I have these fields in my form as follws.
News Id, Topic, Enteredby, entry time(System time),message and expiry_time(Drop down menu, they are one day, two days, three days,one week and one month).
I want to delete the message from the datbase automatically according to the expiry time. For example if the user select one day from expiry_time then the record should be deleted exactly after 1 day and the same thing to be happend for all selections. Aprt from this I wan to give manual deletion also.

Please help me to do this. And I am expecting your reply.If possible please send me some sample codes for this problem. I hope you my friends help me in this problem.

Thanx a lot for your concern.

Bunkermaster

you'll have to rely on what old timers call batch 🙂
use cron to schedule a database check (with potetial deletion of data) every hour/day.

in windows NT,2K,XP use "at" command (for info type at /? in cmd window)

Weedpacket

There is the potential of course for a request to be made for a new item after its expiry time has passed but before the deletion has been made.

In that case, store the expiry date in the database (actually, you already are - as time entered and lifetime). When selecting articles for display, only select those with expiry dates after the current time.

With that in place a cron job isn't really as necessary any more (though it can't hurt). Excactly when you do the deletions isn't as important anymore. You can do it when the items are being selected for viewing, or when new articles are being added, or when they're being manually deleted. Whichever way, the deletion job could be done every time (probably too expensive), or less often and on a random basis (PHP by default uses a probability of 1% when cleaning up old session data).