[PHP] Incremental Date Based ID
I'm trying to set up an ID field that works like this for news articles that are posted to a website. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05b I know how to generate the date, and I am pretty sure I can generate the letter code based on counting the number of rows and then assigning the next letter (we will never have more than 26 in a day... usually its closer to 1 or 2 per day). The problem is if there has been something deleted. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05c If I then Count the rows with this date I get an answer of 2, and so the next letter should be c but there already is a c because b got deleted. So, is there any way of generating this style ID number automatically? -- Kevin Murphy Webmaster - Information and Marketing Services Western Nevada Community College www.wncc.edu (775) 445-3326 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Incremental Date Based ID
Kevin Murphy wrote: I'm trying to set up an ID field that works like this for news articles that are posted to a website. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05b I know how to generate the date, and I am pretty sure I can generate the letter code based on counting the number of rows and then assigning the next letter (we will never have more than 26 in a day... usually its closer to 1 or 2 per day). The problem is if there has been something deleted. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05c If I then Count the rows with this date I get an answer of 2, and so the next letter should be c but there already is a c because b got deleted. So, is there any way of generating this style ID number automatically? Why do you want to do this? If you want to order your results, make it a timestamp field instead of a date field then: select * from table order by timestamp_field desc; If you want to count the number of posts a day, then it depends on which database you are using. -- Postgresql php tutorials http://www.designmagick.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Incremental Date Based ID
At 08:46 PM 3/7/2006, Kevin Murphy wrote: I'm trying to set up an ID field that works like this for news articles that are posted to a website. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05b I know how to generate the date, and I am pretty sure I can generate the letter code based on counting the number of rows and then assigning the next letter (we will never have more than 26 in a day... usually its closer to 1 or 2 per day). The problem is if there has been something deleted. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05c If I then Count the rows with this date I get an answer of 2, and so the next letter should be c but there already is a c because b got deleted. So, is there any way of generating this style ID number automatically? -- Kevin Murphy Webmaster - Information and Marketing Services Western Nevada Community College www.wncc.edu (775) 445-3326 Why make it so HARD?? Having gone that far, just timestamp your id. Not a timestamp in the sense of it being triggered whenever a record was changed, but the time it was created. Better yet - use your publish date and assign a sequence number to the article. Doesn't matter what the number is, but you can then use it to roughly - or accurately - sequence articles for publication. If articles have same sequence number they'll appear in whatever order they were added to the database. For a count of the articles, just count(pub_date). And yes, if you insist, you can generate the number automatically. Just establish a table for id values. It has two fields, table_name and id_value. Write a function to grab the current id_value, then increment and store it. Note grab first, then increment and store. I still think this is much more work than you need. Regards - Miles Thompson -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.2.0/275 - Release Date: 3/6/2006 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
