PHP/MySQL/PDO search on date from database - php

Question

Trying to make a little Search feature for a user, so he can type in a date on a webpage made with HTML/PHP, and see which people in the db have registered as member on or after (a date). My user inputs the date in format 2015-10-01. This gets sent to a PHP page with a jqxGrid on it, populated with member details of members conforming to my query on the MySQL database (using PDO).
The query uses the operator >= on a string passed as (for example) "2015-10-01" in the WHERE clause, so I am using STR_TO_DATE to make the comparison work:
WHERE `lastUpdated` >= STR_TO_DATE( ? , '%Y-%m-%d');
With PDO, the ? later gets bound to the date (which was passed in as a string).
The db column for registration date is in DATETIME format, and in the db values look like: "2015-10-12 17:12:52".
My query returns an empty array every time, - and this after many hours of trying every conceivable permutation of date format, both in the MySQL statement and on the page that prepares the data for populating the grid.
Can someone show me what's wrong here?
Thanks!!
SP

Answer 1

Make it
WHERE `lastUpdated` > ?
and check your data and stuff.
Basically, you should never touch PDO until you get raw SQL to work.

Answer 2

okay, so here is the PDO version that works - passing in ? instead of the date:
function getJSONAllMembersByDate($PDOdbObject, $regDate)
{
try
{
$membersByDateSQL = "SELECT `id`, `name_first`, `name_last`, `organization`,`email`, `phone`,`source`,`comments`,`language_id`, `lastUpdated` FROM `member` WHERE lastUpdated>=?";//'$regDate'
$get=$PDOdbObject->prepare($membersByDateSQL);
$get->execute(array($regDate));
$rows = $get->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
$json=json_encode($rows);
return $json;
}
The fact that it works proves there were other errors in the file containing the jqxwidget (the version before I posted here). I certainly tried about a million different things to get this working.

Answer 3

I don't know if this counts as an answer, but at least it WORKS! There are so many variables in this problem - json, jqxgrid, pdo ... not forgetting that there are several ways to use PDO. I probably had several errors in different places.
(#apokryfos, the STR_TO_DATE was indeed unnecessary.)
In the end, this is what works:
In the PHP page containing the jqxGrid, the url sent to the server is:
url: 'my-json-responses.php?fct=getJSONAllMembersByDate&regDate=<?php echo $fromDate ?>'
This $fromDate comes from the $_POST when the user typed in a date (in the format 2015-10-01) on the input page. When the PHP page containing the jqxGrid loads, it does
$fromDate = $_POST['regDate'];
The url "transits" through the file my-json-reponses.php, which contains many functions. It finds the right one:
if ($_GET['fct'] == 'getJSONAllMembersByDate')
{
$result = getJSONAllMembersByDate($connectionObject, $_GET['regDate']);
echo $result;
}
The $result is called on the file that contains all my PDO database requests, including:
function getJSONAllMembersByDate($PDOdbObject, $regDate) { try
{
$membersByDateSQL = "SELECT `id`, `name_first`, `name_last`, `organization`,`email`, `phone`,`source`,`comments`,`language_id`, `lastUpdated` FROM `member` WHERE lastUpdated>='$regDate'";
$get=$PDOdbObject->query($membersByDateSQL);
$rows = $get->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
$json=json_encode($rows);
return $json;
}
catch (PDOException $e)
{
echo "There was a problem getting all members with this search query.";
echo $e->getMessage();
}}
Note that I couldn't make the version using "?" in the query work at all, hence passing in the variable $regDate directly, with single quotes around the variable just to make life interesting.
This returns a nice list of all my users as of 2015-10-01 - but is presumably still open to MySQL injection attacks ...
But after this marathon of debugging I am happy enough for now. (All improvements welcomed, naturally!)
SP