Question

I am building a website where users can reserve appointments.

I am currently building a javascript app for the project, where user can pick a date from a calendar and see the available appointments. When I am building the calendar, I need to color dates by available appointments (ex. green if there’s any).

In order to do that I need to iterate a javascript array that contains all available reservations. At the moment it looks something like this:

[Object, Object, Object…]

Where the object is a javascript object that contains appointment info. Here is the php service that serves the JSON:

<?php
require_once('../include/dbconnect.php');

$sql = "SELECT appointment.example,... 
person.example,... 
FROM appointment, person
WHERE appointment.reserved=0";

$stmt = $db->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute();

$array = array();
while($row = $stmt->fetchObject()){
array_push($array, $row);
}

echo json_encode($array);
?>

So this finally brings us to the question.

For easier javascript array scanning, I’d need an array/object includes appointments arranged/sorted by date. Then when I am creating an element that represents the date, I can check the object for matching data. Data like this:

{
15.09.2012 : Object,
16.09.2012 : Object{
    appointment1 : Object,
    appointment2 : Object
} 

}

In the database an appointment has an attribute “date” which is currently a string like “16.09.2012”. Should I also change it to unix timestamp?

How should I change the PHP service to output a JSON object that includes appointments filed under dates?

Answer 1

A possible solution is to use associative arrays in php :

$assoc = array("key" => "value");

When you fetch your database records you can do something like this :

$array = array();
while($row = $stmt->fetchObject()){
$array[$row -> date] = $row;
}

echo json_encode($array);

For sorting, you can use the ksort ( http://php.net/manual/en/function.ksort.php ) php function, to sort the array by key.

Now you will have a Javascript Object and not Javascript array.
Now you can iterate the object with for .. in javascript loop ( How to Loop through plain JavaScript object with objects as members? )