Recurring Actions (Calendar Events)

[Rohlan]

Hello everyone.

 

I'm building a calendar system for a client and have finally gotten to the recurring events which I was dreadfully fearing, and now the beast is showing its fangs.

 

Alright, first a little explanation on how it works, its pretty straightforward... each event is stored in the database, within the table "events" I have multiple fields, including starting hour, ending hour, starting date, ending date and "recurring" which can be 0 or 1.

 

So, each event has its own "identity" in the database. The user can specify an end date and also how often it repeats or on which days, in any case the problem I face now is, for recurring events... if an event has an undetermined end date - which happens oftenly - it would naturally be impossible to insert infinite number of events on the database.

 

Anyone have a suggestion? I have seen this be done on many calendar systems... just have no idea on how to take the first step in the right direction.

 

I have thought about Cron Jobs but I steer clear away from cron jobs usually... I'd much rather do it all programactically... I'm never comfortable with CJ...

 

Thank you for any tips!

 

[aebstract]

Cron jobs wouldn't even be for what you're trying to do. You just want to display information on a calendar, correct? When you set recurring to 0 or 1 in the db, lets say 1 = TRUE, then when you pull events for your db you need to have a special statement for when recurring == 1. Let's say it is an event that is once a week every monday, well just run a loop to display that information for as far as you want to go. If you're showing your calendar month by month, just make it generate the days/times that date is going to be displayed and echo it out. I may have made it sound more confusing than it should be. Hopefully it gives you an idea of where to go

[Rohlan]

The thing is, if an "event" starts on 10/12/2008 and ends on 12/12/2008, there will be 3 entries on the database:

 

1 - Client, Place, Hour, 10/12/2008

2 - Client, Place, Hour, 11/12/2008

3 - Client, Place, Hour, 13/12/2008

 

Now, if the end date is undetermined... how will I fill the database correctly? Each "event" has to be stored on the database as a unique entry, these aren't really "events" per-se, they are more like "interventions".

 

There is probably a much better way to do all this...