How to get the latest record?

anand_dumboo

Hi,
I am new to programming and I have created a user registration system, which saves the user details in db. My db table has following fields: id, fname, lname, address, city, zip and country.

Now with DOM XML function i am generating the XML file of registered users and displaying the registered user list.

Now, I want to split the user list into two parts.

Recently registered users
Already registered users

please let me know, how can i do it? and how can i select the only recent registered users from db.

It will be gr8 help for me if you can give a demo script of it.

Thank you
~Anand

PhiSYS

Consider adding a date field. That way you can accurately work with the interval when user registered ( ... regdate=NOW() ... ).

anand_dumboo

can u please give sample script how to add current date in db.

anand_dumboo

hi.. can anyone helpme out in this.

PhiSYS

Create a DATE type field (call it regdate or whatever) and when you insert a new user SET regdate=NOW()

NOW() is a MySQL function returning the current datetime. No php required.

anand_dumboo

Hi PhiSYS,
i have added the date field and now its updating with every record. What i am trying to do is on a page refresh I am generating the XML file. the page refresh after every 2 minutes. and on other hand when i access the page in which i am trying to display the recent member and exiting members it will get always a latest information from XML file since its regenrating after every 2 minutes.

i have written a sql query to select * from the contact table, what i want is to have query which selects only the recent data from table and should not use the data which is already used in early created xml file.

plz. let me know how to proceed.

Thanx
~Anand

PhiSYS

GETTING ALL USERS AND FILTERING BY PHP
Get the regdate as unix_timestamp:
SELECT ..., UNIX_TIMESTAMP(regdate) AS regdate ...

Then in PHP, get the current timestamp with time(). If you define a interval, all you have to do is substract.

$interval = 120; //sec
if ( time() - $interval > $row['regdate'] ) //New members

GETTING ONLY NEW USERS FILTERING BY SQL
In your case:

$recentime = time() - 120 // timestamps are in seconds

Then SELECT ... WHERE UNIX_TIMESTAMP(regdate) >= $recentime ...

PhiSYS

A proper way is gather the last timestamp from file either from the file itself filemtime() or from a stored timestamp in the XML file rather than the current PHP execution time(). That way you don't have to worry about interval.
It will update on each access. If you don't want to, you can control the interval comparing time() with filemtime().
Use clearstatcache() when using filemtime()
http://php.net/filemtime

anand_dumboo

Thanks a lot PhiSYS

i have use the filtering by SQL option, it work out very fine.

Thanks again
~anand