pre-scripting problem solving

severndigital

I am creating a new time clock for my work.

I am trying to figure out the best format to capture the punch in and punch out information for easy calculation later.

any suggestions?

right now i have it set up in this fashion

date_in
time_in
date_out
time_out

i then have mysql doing a time to seconds conversion on difference between time_in and time_out.

This works ok, but only if they punch in and out on the SAME date.

how can i capture the information so i can still calculate the time difference, but also account for it being from a different date.

I'm just trying to set this up right ahead of time, so i don't have to try to fix it later.

thanks in advance,
chris

devinemke

you don't need to store the date and time in two separate fields. just store the in and out dates as DATETIME types. you can then use mySQL's Date and Time Functions to do the math.

severndigital

ok, that makes sense.

to make sure i understand it then,

i would be using mysql to calculate the information upon extraction

instead of

extracting the information and then using php to do the calculations.

thanks,
chris

devinemke

severndigital wrote:
i would be using mysql to calculate the information upon extraction

instead of

extracting the information and then using php to do the calculations.

thanks,
chris

yes, that would be preferable