Re: Re: Incremental Date Based ID

Kevin Murphy wrote:

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.

That doesn't answer the question about why you care about gaps or why you need the number of posts per day.

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

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