Posted by Richard Lynch on 09/28/40 11:14

On Mon, April 25, 2005 3:14 pm, Richard Collyer said:
> This is probably more of a db question but...

Probably.

> I am writing an employee database for work. The majority of it is simple
> enough however I am stuck on the timetabling. It has to be done in PHP
> as there are 40 plus team leaders whose computers are all old and have
> IE on them as one similarity. Also any changes I make to the program are
> repllicated over those machines instantly.

Hrmmmm.

> We have ~1500 Employees. There are 4 shifts which overlap.
>
> My idea of doing this was to have a database with each record being a
> day for a particular employee. Recording ID, Start Time, Finish Time in
> TimeStamp.

Okay.

> So I could then do a search for the number of employees whose shift
> start or finished in that particular day. If there is a start and a
> finish left add up the hours, if only a start do start -> midnight and
> if only a finish do midnight -> finish.
>
> Is this a sensible way to do it? Or can anyone suggest a better tried
> and tested way.

Doing what, exactly?

I mean, it kinda depends on what you want to *DO* other than the search
you give as an example...

Which, by the way, I would recommend coding more like this:

1. Find everybody whose shift STARTED on date (D).
2. Subtract their finish time from start time for their hours (H) on that
date (D).

You then don't have to muck around with midnight and shifts that start/end
on different days.

You just pretend that their shift happend on the date of the start time,
and that's the day you associate with that shift, no matter when it ended.

This simplifies everything else you're going to do with the data/queries
immensely.

--
Like Music?
http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm

[Back to original message]