Question

I have a table with holiday destinations in with a visit_date column and a status column.
visit date is when they plan to go/or have been to this destination. When these holidays are being inserted into database, I wrote this to determine if the people are going or have been on this trip.

$date = $_POST['date']; 
$today = date("Y/m/d");  

if($date<$today){
$status="been";
}else{
$status="going";
}

But what I need to do is write a script that runs after the insert to update the status of the old holiday plans from going to been if the visit_date is less than todays date as in yesterday, last week etc..

this is what I have so far

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM trips");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
  //echo $row['visit_date'];

  if ($row['visit_date'] < $today){
      echo "this trip has already happened";
      //code to update status if trip already happened

  }
  }

Answer 1

You can do:

UPDATE trips
SET status = 'been'
WHERE status = 'going' AND visit_date < NOW()

But you know what would even be better? Get rid of of the status column. Then whenever you need to select trips and want to figure out their status, use a conditional IF statement like so:

SELECT
    trip_id,
    IF(visit_date < NOW(), 'been', 'going') AS status,
    ...
FROM trips