How to do a date stamp in CakePHP

Question

I'm doing an enquiry system and I want every enquiry created to have a date stamp (not time). Just wondering how I would go about doing this. I'm guessing I'd start with grabbing the current date, then saving the data? Sorry I'm new to this :/

Answer 1

This is super easy in CakePHP.

1) add a 'created' field to your enquiry table in your database, and give it type Datetime

2) There is no 2. CakePHP will automatically populate the field with the current date, each time a new record is saved.

Note: you may also want to add a 'modified' Datetime field. Similar to created, it will be automatically updated each time a record is modified and saved.

Answer 2

Just create a field named "created" of type datetime in your table and cake will do the job for you. The format in this cae is "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:

You can use the CakePHP TimeHelper to format that date for output as you like - even as timestamp if thats a hard requirement.

Alternatively, if you want another field as timestamp, and if you do it in a controller:

$this->request->data['ModelName']['timestamp'] = time();
$this->ModelName->save($this->request->data);

Best practice: Any data manipulation should happen in a model.

$this->data[$this->alias]['timestamp'] = time();
$this->save($this->data);

You can use the beforeSave() callback in the model to set the field there so it happens automatically. If you just want to do it on create you'll need to add a check.