Question

It sounds more complicated than it actually is. Here is what I’m trying to do within the SELECT part:

SELECT TIMESTAMPADD(
          UCASE(
                 SUBSTRING(offset_unit,1,CHAR_LENGTH(offset_unit)-1)
                ),1,'2003-01-02') as offset_date

offset_unit is a VARCHAR column in the database. It contains one of the following: “Hours”,”Minutes”.

offset is an INT.

I am trying to convert the offset_unit to uppercase, after I have removed the last character (‘s’) so I can have a proper interval (MINUTE, HOUR…) so I can get a date that I can use in sorting afterwards, but MySQL keeps throwing an error. I have tested each step by adding one function at a time, and it only fails after I add TIMESTAMPADD. If I enter MINUTE manually then it works.

Any way to get this working?

Additional info: I am running this in CakePHP 1.3, in a find, within the ‘fields’ array, but that shouldn’t be important.

Answer 1

this can be easily achived by using CASE WHEN clause as:

SELECT (CASE 
            WHEN offset_unit = 'HOURS' 
                   THEN TIMESTAMPADD(HOUR,`offset`,'2003-01-02')
            WHEN offset_unit = 'MINUTES' 
                   THEN TIMESTAMPADD(MINUTE,`offset`,'2003-01-02')
        END) AS offset_date
FROM my_table;

SEE SQLFIDDLE DEMO HERE