Question

I have a web application written in php5.

The application allows users to register and I would like to delay when the various details such as password and links will be sent out. I would like the email containing this information to go 24h after a user has resisted.

How can I to execute the function that will send the email after 24 hours has passed?

Answer 1

It would depend on how accurate ’24’ hours needs to be, but something like the following approach should work.

Create a table to hold user registrations, or adapt an existing table to hold a registrationTime column. Make this column nullable DATETIME you will use it to hold the HH:MM
of the users registration. The new (or modified) table should also have the data relevant for the emails, or a common identifier for users, allowing the correct data to be selected.

Finally, you would set up a cron job to query the data base every x mins and select the users who registered within y mins of 24hours. Where x is how often you want the job to run and y would be some degree of tolerance for how close to 24:00 hours had elapsed.

For any results you would construct and send the emails. Finally you would set some a flag to show that user had been dealt with – a good way would be setting the registrationTime to null for all users who have had the email sent.

Here are a few links to help you out:

Compare time in SQL Server
How can I compare time in SQL Server?

Introducing Cron
http://www.sitepoint.com/introducing-cron/