Need help finding difference in time.

[Discord]

I have a database that has stored the last time a user visited as a time(); type storage... etc... When the user visits another page i want to run a query against the table and find all users that have been viewing that previous page in the past 5 minutes...

So the forumla is the time(); - last stored time(); and if at or under 5 minutes then display the username. But.. i'm having difficulty figuring out what would constitue 5 minutes in math...

would it just be current time - old time =< 5
??

Oh... and can this be done directly in the sql query to i can just return the whole list of people that have accessed in the last 5 min?

[drew010]

IF
current_time - old_time <= 300
THEN
user has visited in less than five minutes

You can use sql to retrieve the old time and the take a new time() check and do the math quickly and then decide whether or not to print that user in the list.

Hope it helps.

[mxpx4]

Check this example out:

$current_time = time();

$fiveminutes_ago = $current_time - 300;

Then, do a query to the database for all the viewed times that are greater than or equal to the $fiveminutes_ago variable.

I think this would be much more efficient than running an if...else on EVERY user in the database. That way your SQL query does all the work for you 🙂

[Discord]

Hey ty! 😃