Creating a sequential numbered ticket id

[chowie]

Hello everyone.  I have a piece of code that I need to get changed.  Currently I have a ticket system that creates an unique and random number, e.g. 5Z3GBJUUQR.  I would like to change the code so that I get a sequential number that continues to increment with the current date added to the number, e.g. 2011-07-04-00001, 2011-07-04-00002, etc.  Here is the current code that I have to work with.  Any help on this would greatly be appreciated.  I'm fairly new at php scripting, and I am stuck.  Thank you for your help.

 

Chris Howard

 

Current Code:

/* Generate tracking ID and make sure it's not a duplicate one */

$useChars = 'AEUYBDGHJLMNPQRSTVWXZ123456789';

$trackingID = $useChars{mt_rand(0,29)};

for($i=1;$i<10;$i++)

{

$trackingID .= $useChars{mt_rand(0,29)};

}

 

 

[Psycho]

It's not clear from your post, but do you want the incrementing number to reset each day or does it continue with the next number the following day?

 

For example, this:

2011-07-04-00001
2011-07-04-00002
2011-07-05-00001

 

Or this:

2011-07-04-00001
2011-07-04-00002
2011-07-05-00003

 

The second option is actually easier to do. Just have an auto-increment field in the table (I assume you are using a database) AND a date field. The "ticket" number would be the concatenation of those two values.

[Psycho]

Here is a solution if you want the id component to restart each day. It still uses three fields: ticket, id and date, but the difference is that the id field is not an auto-increment field and the ticket field is the primary index for the table.

//Get the last ticket entered for today
$query = "SELECT `id`
          FROM `tableName`
          WHERE  DATE(`date`) = DATE(NOW())
          ORDER BY `id` DESC
          LIMIT 1";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

//Detemine the new ticket id component
if(mysql_num_rows($result)==0)
{
    $ticketID = 1;
}
else
{
    $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
    $ticketID = $row['id'] + 1;
}
$ticketDate = date("Y-m-d");
$newTicket =  "{$ticketDate}-{$ticketID}";

//Create INSERT query
$query = "INSERT INTO `tableName`
              (`ticket`, `date`, `id`)
          VALUES ('$newTicket', '$ticketDate', $ticketID)";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

[TeNDoLLA]

I really don't see why you could not just use the ID as primary key & autoincrement, then use the ID as the identefier. Does it really matter if you have values like 2011-07-5-145 and 2011-07-5-146 ? You can still sort and arrange tickets for that day by the end of the ticked identifier if you want or need.