[RESOLVED] Saving and retrieving date to MySQL from PHP ?

[quecoder]

HIiiiiiiIIiI 🙂 , I'm developing a small site for online hotel reservation , I want to create the reservation form ( that has a date calender for check in and check out dates for this booking ) .
I will make two drop down lists for each , one for check in and one for check out . the 2st drop down , contains months of the current year , and 2nd contains days of months ( 1-31 , I ignored 30-days months , 28 or 29 days like February , because I don't know how to make this for the selected month ,any body knows?)

now , when I have the date selected by the customer , how to store it in the database to be able to retrieve it properly later , and also to determine if that type of rooms is ran out for new bookings ?

I don't know what data type to set for this field in MySQL .. I'm not good at dates either in MySQL or PHP..

Please help

[shamly]

well when using PHP one of the simplest of ways to save the date and time is to use a timestamp. Straight from the manual .. A timestamp is a long integer containing the number of seconds between the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) and the time specified.

A timestamp can be created using the mktime function in PHP. Check the PHP manual for mktime(). Also to convert a timestamp back to human readable format you can use the date() function or strftime() function.

[quecoder]

so , I make the field data type in mysql ,'timestamp' ?
converting before storing and converting before reading it ?

[NogDog]

I recommend setting the database column type to that which most closely defines the type of data to be stored in it, thus I would recommend that you use a DATE type. This makes it easier to utilize the DBMS's built-in date/time functions.

In your PHP script, you can simply take the values from your form and build an appropriate date string. For instance, assume there are 3 fields in your form: "year", "month", and "day" and that the each return an integer value.

if(!checkdate($_POST['month'], $_POST['day'], $_POST['year']))
{
   // invalid date value(s) received, so display error to user and have them retry
}
else
{
   $date = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, $_POST['month'], $_POST['day'], $_POST['year']));
   // use $date as the value for your DB query
}

[quecoder]

thanks NogDog

[bradgrafelman]

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved (if it is).