How do you deal with blank dates?

[jeff5656]

I have a DATE field.  When somone fills out a form and leaves this field blank, a blank cannot be accepted by the DATE field type, so it gets stored as 12/31 1969.

 

I have used IF statements to convert it to some date way in the future, but that's awkward because then when I'm displaying the records I need another IF statement to not display that date.

How do you guys deal with blank dates (that are then converted to 1969)?

[Caesar]

Why not keep ANY data from submitting, unless the user inputs a valid date? Maybe I just need to know a little bit more about what you're trying to do....

[jeff5656]

Because I don't know beforehand whether that field will be left blank, or whether they will put in a date.  So when I process the form I have to set that variable:

$stopdate = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($_POST['stopdate']));

 

And then when I get to this, if it was blank, it's stored as 1969.

 

$query = "INSERT INTO meds (med_id, pt_id, med, dose, startdate, active, stopdate)

VALUES('','$pt_id', '$med', '$dose', '$startdate','$active','$stopdate')";

[chauffeur]

Use $_getdate and use it to auto-fill the field 'if' left blank ("");

 

 

[mikesta707]

what is the date? is it todays date? or date of submission? if so you should get the date yourself, and not worry about the user putting a date.

 

also dates are best submit with drop down menus, and if you really want to enforce that they enter a date, you could just make an if statement that does that, and don't submit to the database if the date is empty

[jeff5656]

No no no.  If the date is blank it means there is no date at all associated with that record, so I don't WANT to put a date in.  If the user left it blank, then there is no due date at all.  I want it to remain null.  However, what I was wondering, is how do you deal with this scenario, where the date is blank and you want to keep it blank but the field is a DATE so it can't be blank. 

[mikesta707]

set them to null in the table (rather than a blank value)

 

consult this page for tips on dealing with null values

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/working-with-null.html