Re: Re: Incremental Date Based ID

Well, part of the issue is that I want to be able to use this as part of the link: /news.php?article=2006-03-05a /news.php?article=2006-03-05b which i will eventually do a htacess rewrite to make it look like /news/2006-03-05a.php /news/2006-03-05a.php I don't think I can do that with just the Unix timestamp. On Mar 7, 2006, at 4:56 PM, Al wrote:

Kevin Murphy wrote:

I'm trying to set up an ID field that works like this for news articles that are posted to a website. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05b I know how to generate the date, and I am pretty sure I can generate the letter code based on counting the number of rows and then assigning the next letter (we will never have more than 26 in a day... usually its closer to 1 or 2 per day). The problem is if there has been something deleted. 2006-03-05a 2006-03-05c If I then Count the rows with this date I get an answer of 2, and so the next letter should be "c" but there already is a "c" because "b" got deleted. So, is there any way of generating this style ID number automatically? --Kevin Murphy Webmaster - Information and Marketing Services Western Nevada Community College www.wncc.edu (775) 445-3326

Why not simply use the Unix time stamp. time() If more than one can arrive within the same second, append a letter. If users need to see the key, use date() to decode it for them