Question

I’m a bit of a nub when it comes to SQL queries and I couldn’t find any help so I figured I’d ask.

I’m currently working on an event tracker/calendar style thing, with two types of events. One is a standard starts at X and ends at Y, while the other is “all day” (ie, starts at 12:01 AM, ends at 11:59 PM). My problem is the database query to sort it properly. What I’m trying to do is get the return such that the all-day events are at the very end of that day’s list.

For example, if I have 4 events, one at 1 PM, one at 2 PM, one all day, and one tomorrow at 11 AM, it would look like:

• 1:00 PM Event
• 2:00 PM Event
• All Day Event
• Tomorrow 11:00 AM Event

I’ve got UNIX timestamps (in seconds for whatever reason) for start and end dates, and my current attempt is

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY all_day_flag, startTime;

This won’t work, because it would always put the all-day events at the end, so any tips on where to refine it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to extract the date and time separately from your Unix timestamp, and then use the date as the first sort option, followed by all-day flag and then the time.

Try this:

SELECT date(startTime, 'unixepoch') AS startDate,
       time(startTime, 'unixepoch') AS startHour,
       time(endTime,   'unixepoch') AS endHour,
       all_day_flag
  FROM table
  ORDER BY
    startDate, all_day_flag, startHour;