I would like to save NSDate to a MySQL field. Which type is the best? DATE or TIMESTAMP? And how to format my NSDate to send it (to a PHP script) and save it in my field?
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I would like to save NSDate to a MySQL field. Which type is the best? DATE or TIMESTAMP? And how to format my NSDate to send it (to a PHP script) and save it in my field?
You asked two questions.
Regarding MySQL DATETIME vs TIMESTAMP, see Should I use field 'datetime' or 'timestamp'?
Regarding getting from NSDate to MySQL via PHP…
NSDate is an object representing a point in time. To send it over a network, you need to serialize it into some format (that is, turn it into a string). The easiest thing to do is put it in the format
yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss, because that is what MySQL will want.Use
NSDateFormatterto convert the NSDate object into a string of that format. Make sure to set the formatter time zone to UTC, so you will get consistent results regardless of the time zone of the device/computer your NSDate was computed on. Then send it over the network to your PHP script.In the PHP script, you can just take the value directly and save it to a DATETIME column.
Bonus: make sure you use prepared statements (the PHP PDO library, which comes with PHP will allow this), otherwise you will be at risk for SQL injection.