Question

When the customers submit the orders on the website.. staffs can view the pending orders (pull data from mysql) on the admin backend but I want the pending orders to split into two team.

Example

We have received 21 pending orders.

There are 11 staffs.

Team 1: 5 staffs

Team 2: 6 staffs

Team 1 can view 11 orders and Team 2 can view 10

Sometime I might get 100 orders every hour – PHP should determine to split half of the pending orders into two teams (dynamically)…

Should the team_id set on the order table? Eg: tbl_orders.team_id = 2 when users submit the orders? .. but what if not enough staffs logged in team 1 or 2

Answer 1

You have 2 ways.

First (dynamic)

First of all you count all the pendings:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM pending;

Then you show the first half to team 1:

$half = round($count/2);
SELECT * FROM pending ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT $half;

Team 2 gets:

SELECT * FROM pending ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT $half,$half;

If you have more team you just need to divide for the total number of teams insted by 2.

Second option (fixed)

When pending are inserted you associate them with a team. But you have to add another field to your table.

Let’s say you have a field team TINYINT(1) UNSIGNED.

When the next pending is placed you check the last team inserted with this:

 SELECT team FROM pending ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1;

Let’s say you have a config where is stored your number of teams:

 $totalTeamsAvailable = 2;

With the value that you have select with the query you do:

 $nextTeam = (++$teamFromSql % $TotalTeamsAvailable) + 1;

Now you have the team that can be associated with this pending. Of course you add it with

 INSERT INTO pending (data,team) VALUES (,$nextTeam);

This second solution may suffer of race condition. (IE: 2 pending placed at nearly the same istant may be associated with the same team, but I believe this will not hurt at all )

Addedum

To count the team that recently have done something you have 2 ways:

• You need a table teams where you store the last login data of the staff.
• Store each actions that each teams have done (for example team 1 approved and sent order pending #2) with a data (maybe you have already this table)

At this point it’s easy to select the number of team with a recently activity.
Using the table team you just need to do a:

$teamWithRecentlyActivity = SELECT COUNT(*) FROM teams WHERE lastLogin > (time() - (60*60*24));   
//> This select all teams within 1 day from last login

Having this number you can split all the pending you need with:

$pendingPerTeam = round($totalPendings / $teamWithRecentlyActivity);

And use this offset within my first solution