date help...countdown to expiary

[shane85]

hey guys...I made a post on this few days ago but still am unsure on how I should do this, or for that matter what would be the best way. open to suggestions.

 

what im doing is basically I have a form that submits to a database. One of the fields in my form is "contact_next", which is a drop down menu to chose from. The options are 1 day, 2 day, 3 day, 1 wk, 2 wk, 3 wk, 1 month, 2 month, 3 month, 6 month

 

I also have it storing a timestamp of when this entry is added. So I have a time stamp of when added, and when to contact next. So id imagine I would do a time - contact_next? Or something like that - because I have an option when viewing my entrys "View by when to Contact Next" say I have 4 records that are suppost to be viewed in 1 day, so for 1 day those records will be displayed first before the records from 2 days, 3 days etc. Im not sure how to store the "contact_next" in the database to do it properly to fetch the information.

 

thanks

[taquitosensei]

I would store it as a datetime      then in php you can do the math to get how many days.

 

$today="2010-04-05"; 
$time_next="2010-04-28"; 

$timediff=(strtotime($time_next)-strtotime($today));
$minutes=$timediff/60; 
$hours=$minutes/60; 
$days=ceil($hours/24); 

[shane85]

hmm

 

I tried your code and tried to echo days and it displayed 23, which is correct and what I want. However when I entered my variables it displayed a wierd number...my code is as follows

 

	  <?php
  $today=$arrEntry['tstamp'];
  $time_next=$arrEntry['contact_next'];
  $timediff=(strtotime($time_next)-strtotime($today));
  $minutes=$timediff/60;
  $hours=$minutes/60;
  $days=ceil($hours/24);
  
  echo $days;
      ?>

 

it displayed 14888 as the number of days...in my db, tstamp is 2010-04-05 15:37:54 and contact_next is 2010-10-05

 

does it matter that in my db for tstamp time is recorded as well? or its only looking at the date?

[taquitosensei]

it looks like you're data is already a timestamp so you can lose the strtotime's

[shane85]

now it displays -14704

 

	  <?php
  $today=$arrEntry['tstamp'];
  $time_next=$arrEntry['contact_next'];
  $timediff=(($time_next)-($today));
  $minutes=$timediff/60;
  $hours=$minutes/60;
  $days=ceil($hours/24);
  
  echo $days;
      ?>

[taquitosensei]

echo out tstamp and concat_next 

make sure they're both timestamps.  If one is a datetime then use the strtotime on that one.