sending date/time to mySQL dB w/ form data

[bhola]

i'm a total n00b to this... compassion advised 😉

i have a form and i've managed to populate form elements from a mySQL dB!! woohoo step 1! i created a table in the dB to send the form data too. i would like to send a date/time stamp along with the form data, so we have a record of when the form was submitted. i am using microsoft IIS as server. is there a function to pull the date/time off the server? then i would need to write it to a hidden field on the form?
any ideas on a good way to do this?

thanks for your time & assistance!

[LordShryku]

Take a look here...

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php

$date = date("Y-m-d");
//mysql compatible date stamp

[bhola]

thank you oh mighty Lord 😃

[bhola]

well that was easy. yay PHP!! i have another question now. this form will reside on 2 different servers. one here in US and one in Europe. i would like to have a php script that would check the server name (or some unique identifier) and depending on the location would either write the date as d-m-Y for Europe or m-d-Y for US.

any ideas or links to helpful info appreciated.

[LordShryku]

if($_SERVER['server_name'] == "europe") {
    $date = date("d-m-Y");
}
else {
    $date = date("Y-m-d");
}

[keith73]

Originally posted by bhola
well that was easy. yay PHP!! i have another question now. this form will reside on 2 different servers. one here in US and one in Europe. i would like to have a php script that would check the server name (or some unique identifier) and depending on the location would either write the date as d-m-Y for Europe or m-d-Y for US.

any ideas or links to helpful info appreciated.

From the mysql manual:

Although MySQL tries to interpret values in several formats, it always expects the year part of date values to be leftmost. Dates must be given in year-month-day order (for example, '98-09-04'), rather than in the month-day-year or day-month-year orders commonly used elsewhere (for example, '09-04-98', '04-09-98').

so if you use a date or datetime field in MySQL you should always put the date in YYY-MM-DD HH:mm:SS format.
The other alternative is to store the date as an integer value, (epoch timestamp). int(10) unsigned

$timestamp = time();

Mixing up the formats of the date field will give you incorrect results when you try and sort the data. You can store it as a char column and then parse the string.

I suggest storing it as an int and setting another field for the timezone or for the region and using that field to determine how to display the data.

check out this article about timezones.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ehresman20030911.php3

• keith

[bhola]

wow keith great information!! i'm learning a lot these days. thanks guys. i think i'll keep it simple and stick to YY-mm-dd. that makes sense to everyone since it goes largest to smallest. for now i just want a datestamp so it's possible to sort records by date. nothing fancy.
thanks again for the help & infos 🙂

[bhola]

another question. when creating the date field in the table i am selecting the DATETIME type, but what length do i want to set? the datestamp from the form is going to be YYYY-mm-dd, but i don't know if the dashes are removed or not. so would it be a length of 8 or 10?