Question

I want to create a countdown kinda thing in my app, the column ‘end_date‘ is in DATETIME format. if i use:

echo $thing['table_name']['end_date']

output is(todays’ date):

2012-08-16

where as i want the output to be:

3 days left

now how can i do this? i’ll be using this in a lot of different views, i found this tutorial but i’d have to put this code again and again. i wanna solve this with a more OOP approach. Is it possible to put this in the Model directly or something of that sort?

Any direction would be of great help. 🙂

Answer 1

You should use virtualFields in this case

class Thing {
    var $virtualFields = array( 
    'timeleft' => "IF(Thing.end_date IS NOT NULL AND Thing.end_date <> '0000-00-00',CONCAT(DATEDIFF(Thing.end_date,CURDATE()),' days left'),'-')"
    ); 
}

now you will get this field under echo $thing['table_name']['timeleft']