louis gonzales wrote:
Hello all,
Is there an existing mechanism is postgresql that can automatically increment/decrement on a daily basis w/out user interaction? The use case I'm considering is where a student is in some type of contract with an instructor of some sort, and that contract puts a time limit on the student requiring her to pay a fee by a certain day. IF that day comes to pass - or a certain number of days elapse - and that payment requirement hasn't been met, I want to trigger a function.

The one requirement I want to impose is, that no end user of the DB application, needs to do anything to set the trigger, other than the initialization of making the student of this type.

An example would be:
Day1 - Application user(typically the instructor) creates a profile for a new student - John Doe, which sets a 30 day time limit for John Doe to pay $100.00
Day2 -> Day31 - John Doe didn't make the payment
Day 31 - Trigger of event occurs when the instructor logs in.

Basically on Day 1 when John Doe's profile was created, I want a decrement counter to occur daily on his profile(some attribute/timer) and nothing should happen until day 31 when he doesn't pay.


Further to Andreas' suggestion to use CRON, you don't require a decrement of anything. When the profile is created, your date_created (or whatever) column will be set. Then your script (called by CRON) only needs to test for rows that a) have not paid, and b) are outside the bounds set in the script (eg. MAX_GRACE_PERIOD = 30).

brian

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?

              http://archives.postgresql.org/

Reply via email to