Xataface Forums

Hi All,

here's my second question for the day.

If I use the date function to select a "start date" and an "end date" for a "new entry" in one of my tables, I'd like something that auto calculates how many months that is in one of my columns. Can anyone help at all?

Cheers

Paul

You might consider using a grafted field to have mysql make the calculation for you.

Code: Select all

__sql__ = "select t.*, datediff(t.end_date,t.start_date) as num_days from mytable t"


This would create a column called num_days. You could estimate number of months from this.

-Steve

Hi Steve,

Excellent, many thanks. period_diff did the trick with the same code.

Thanks again.

Paul

I thought period_diff sorted out the months for me but didn't

Is there anything like oracle's months_between() that you know of?

Cheers

I was a little surprised when you said that you got period_diff to work for you. The mysql docs stated that the inputs for period_diff are not dates, but rather are strings of the form 'YYMMDD'.

I didn't see any specific function to give the month diff. My suggestion to do the data_diff would allow you to do a pretty easy calculation of month difference in PHP (e.g. in the fieldname__display() method).