I need your ideas

aa720

I am trying to put together an availability calender using php and mysql. I have managed to get one working but I have had to build it the long way. A user can go in tick off the days, and when the calender is displayed these days are replaced with red gifs, showing other users when this person is available.
However the database is massive and before you laugh I had to use the following format to do this,

id
jan1
jan2
jan3

this goes upto december 31st.

Does anyone have any ideas how I cut down the work. The same goes for the actual calenders as well, the php page calls the variables i.e $jan1, $jan2 and so on up to december 31st. How could I do a calender that automatically creates the days and automatically assigns each one an echo call i.e <? echo"$jan1"; ?>
and also one that dynamically calls the information from the database and puts check boxes under each date for each month and again outputs this to a page so the calender can be updated.

hope this makes sense

greg252

I'm not sure buy I think PHP has calendar functions but they must be installed at complie time (mcal)

I wrote a small function to generate a cal WITHOUT mcal, but I never did anything with it.

I remember I used date() functions to determine first day of the month and how many days the month has and looped through to generate graphical cal. You can then do a search on DB with generated dates.

check out the code snippets on this site, I think that will get you started.

aa720

Thanks for your reply. I might as well stick with what I have got for the moment. My code is very long winded, but at the end of the days works. After I have completed this, I will look at the alternatives.

crislewis

I use a simple binary style text field with one char per day.

Records in the db are as follows:

field Value

year 2003

avail YYYYNNNNNNNNNNNNYYY.....

Each year starts on jan 1 so:

if (substr($avail,31,1) ="Y") {

// feb 1 is available

}

This will cut your db down to size.

I also use this for a rolling calander of availabitiy on one of my sites by replacing the year with the start date of the availability data. This is useful where you do not need to know historic data (as in say holiday rentals for a booking system).