Question

I am working on an intranet web application using PHP/MySQL. My question is about scheduled events: I have 2 important dates per year (let me call them date_01 and date_02) where the system has to change the start-time of check-in for the employees. For example, at date_01 check-in starts at x-time while at date_02 check-in starts at y-time. It is like summer check-in time is different than winter check-in time …

From software engineering point of view, what do you think is the best way of achieving this?
-> Cron job?
-> MySQL scheduled events?
-> A certain PHP trick if possible?
-> Your suggestions?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think you don’t need scheduled tasks at all. You can have a table like this:

check_ins (valid_from, valid_until, check_in_start_time)

And then do something like this when you need to get current check-in start time in your web application:

select check_in_start_time
from check_ins
where
    now() >= valid_from and
    now() < valid_until