Home/ Questions/Q 318227
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T08:33:00+00:00

i’m developing a read-only weekly calendar view of users’s events. Columns are the days

  • 0

i’m developing a read-only weekly calendar view of users’s events.
Columns are the days of the week (mon > sun)
Rows are timeslots (8:00>9:00, 9:00>10:00… from 8AM up to 7PM)

Question: what’s the best approach to generate that user calendar:

Option 1: pure SQL
I don’t even know if that is possible, but i would find it supremelly elegant: have mysql generate a table with 7 columns (the days) and 11 rows (the timeslots) and have subqueries for each timeslot, checking if there is a meeting booked for that timeslot/user.

option 2: php/mysql
have mysql just retrieve the meetings booked/user, and cross it with a php-generated calendar.

Is option 1 at all possible? If it is, is it resource-intensive?

Thank you,
Alexandre

UPDATE: QUERY SUGGESTIONS

Here is the “option 2” query i use to get the booked events (lessons in this case: the user is a teacher).

SELECT DISTINCT date, hour_from, hour_to, courses.description, courses.alias, teachers.name, locations.new_acronym
        FROM timetables
        INNER JOIN courses ON (courses.id=timetables.course_id)
        INNER JOIN teachers ON (teachers.id=timetables.prof_id)
        INNER JOIN locations ON (locations.id=timetables.location_id)
        WHERE ((timetables.prof_id='$id')
           AND (timetables.date >= '$starting_date')
           AND (timetables.date < date_add('$starting_date', INTERVAL 7 day))) ;

I’m very interested for suggestions on a query that would make option 1 work !

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Trying to describe a calendar as a SQL table doesn’t sound like a good match. It’s certainly possible to perform a query that will generate a table with 7 columns and 11 rows, but then what would you do with that generated table? You’d still have to render it using PHP.

    So start with the assumption that PHP is rendering a calendar, and do away with the extra work of making SQL generate one (and an extremely specific one!) beforehand. This way you can use a single SQL query to retrieve all the events that should be visible in one shot, and then place them on the calendar as you draw it.

    • 0