Triggers??

dougal85

Coding in PHP4, as always 🙂

Sometimes you see websites that do stuff like, inactive users are deleted after 30 days. and so on.

When/how do you trigger this?

I can only see how to do it by running a check ALL the time, and that just seems silly. Then if the operation takes a while the unlucky user that is viewing the site will be punished.

For some reason I can fit this into my model of how a PHP program will work.

Weedpacket

Well, it's pretty simple. Each time the user uses the site, record in the database the time they used it. Every now and then (certainly doesn't have to be ALL the time) run a database query that marks all users with last-use times more than thirty days as being "deleted". If that takes a long time you ought to reconsider your database design or choice of dbms.

dougal85

ok, sorry I was only using that as an example.

Sorry, i'm hypothetically thinking, i don't actually have a use for this yet. I was just thinking about ideas for a project I might be doing.

Basically say you have a procedure that needs to be carried out monthly. and this makes a large number of changes... this may take 10 seconds for example, not that long but long enough to annoy any user that comes across this problem.

Would the only other way to do this be to trigger it on an admin account only or something? there is no way to set the process off and not force the user to wait for it.