I'm hoping for some general advice on an approach for the following scenario:
I have a customer who wants to put an incentive program in place for students taking learning modules and then completing tests. The concept is simple. Award the first 10 people who complete a test with a score of 100%... that type of thing. Students are allowed to take test more than once. Track each time the student takes the test and show the latest score ect. You get the idea. I have the database tables and relationships already all set up for the tests, but it's the tracking of the dates and times that I don't have and it got me thinking. I need to track down to the day/hour/minute level. Okay, that should be easy (I think). I'm going to need to do a lot of date/time calculations. Would it be best just to have a default of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP set for a TIMESTAMP field? Or, is their something else I should be using? I have limited experience having to munge and crunch date/time info and I want to make sure I have the flexibility to do what I need in the future. The next gotcha I thought up is what about different time zones. Obviously without this consideration, people on the East coast would have an unfair 3 hour advantage over people on the west coast. I guess I can have a time zone field in my student table so I could derive the time difference. Any suggestions on a good time zone approach? Here are my two tables as they stand now. I'm wondering if these are set up in a way to allow me to do all this date time crunching I'm going to need to do in the future? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated :-) CREATE TABLE `students` ( `store_id` varchar(6) NOT NULL, `email` varchar(64) NOT NULL, `fname` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `lname` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `role` char(2) NOT NULL default '5', `password` varchar(8) NOT NULL, `phone` varchar(24) default NULL, `reg_date` date default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`email`), UNIQUE KEY `email` (`email`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; CREATE TABLE `completed_modules` ( `module_id` char(2) NOT NULL default '', `email` varchar(64) NOT NULL, `score` int(2) NOT NULL default '0', `time` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; Brian Menke Visual Matter, Inc 1445 Foxworthy Ave., Suite 50-215 San Jose, CA 95118 408 375 9969 San Jose ~ Los Angeles www.visualmatter.com
