I suppose I'll just concede now :) Thanks for putting up with my
sarcasm and humoring my other ideas. I really wanted to see if there
were any other methods out there and do appreciate everyone's ideas.
Thanks again, CRON it is.
Glen Parker wrote:
Wes Sheldahl wrote:
if you did have a cron job run to check, you would probably just have
it set a boolean field on expired records or something of that sort,
and run it a little after midnight, at the start of each day,
assuming durations were always being measured in days.
Exactly. You flag when you discover an expired condition, and you
flag again when the condition is acted upon. Easy. The instructor
doesn't need to be bothered any more than you choose. You could even
set a timestamp indicating the last time the instructor was harrassed
about it, so you can re-harrass on a daily or weekly basis :-)
Now, my example that had the expire query run when the instructor logs
on was just to illustrate that if you do this right, it doesn't matter
when the code runs. Personally, I'd have a cron job do it at
midnight, but whenever it runs, even if it's multiple times a day, the
outcome should still be correct. That's where your status flags come
in. Once a record has been expired, there's no reason for your expire
code to ever look at that record again, right?
-Glen
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