Polling Database with PHP?

Hello all,
My question is the following. I want to make an electronic reminder in which the user can loggin, add an event and specify the time that the app will send him an email. Is it possible to create a php function that will poll the database every minute in order to find the events? Is that the right way to do this or are they any other solutions?

Hey,

I'm afraid I am a bit of a newbie, so this solution is more than likely flawed - there's probably also a better way to do it. This is just an idea of how I would go about it first time round!

You will need to write your script first, that queries the database for all records who's date and time has passed the current date and time. Then use a foreach loop to cycle through an array (obtained from the mysql_fetch_array() function) in order to:

1. Use the mail() function to email the user(s).
2. Drop the records from the database that contain send reminders, so that a reminder is not sent out again.

If you are running a Linux\Unix server, use cron to set the script to run every minute (click here for a got intro to cron). If you are running a Windows server, just set the script to run at the required interval by setting up a simple scheduled task. A good tutorial on how to do this on versions of since Win98 is located at http://www.iopus.com/guides/winscheduler.htm.

Like I say, give it a shot - its just an idea.

Hope I've helped!!

Regards,


Ben Hodgson

in order to make the script usersite. You can use a <meta></meta> tag to reload the tjekpage veery so often. And this could be the logon page