Trouble pulling events between 2 dates in Codeigniter / PHP - php

Question

I have created an events calendar with codeigniters calendar class which you can view here: Events Calendar
I have it set up where the events are showing up on the calendar and when you click "view events" on a particular day, all the events with that start date pull up and are shown in a modal window.
Well... the problem is that unless its the START DATE of a particular event, the modal window details don't pull up. I know this is because i'm saying in my query to pull events where the start date equals a certain date...
I'm kind of stumped on how to modify this to say, "pull all records where this day is ANYWHERE BETWEEN the start and end date of the event.
Do I need to run a while loop or something and loop through each day of the month? Any ideas on an easier way to do this are appreciated.
the start and end dates are set up as 'Y-m-d H:i:s' in the database and the $query_date variable being passed in is 'Y-m-d', which i change to the same format in the first few lines of the function.
function get_list_events($query_date) {
$start_date_start = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($query_date.' 00:00:00'));
$start_date_end = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($query_date.' 23:59:59'));
$this->db->where('active', 1);
$this->db->where("start_date BETWEEN '$start_date_start%' AND '$start_date_end%'", NULL, FALSE);
$query = $this->db->get('events');
$data = array();
foreach ($query->result() as $row) {
$data[] = array(
'id' => $row->id,
'title' => $row->title,
'description' => $row->description,
'cost' => $row->cost,
'image' => $row->image,
'start_date' => $row->start_date,
'end_date' => $row->end_date,
'venue' => $row->venue,
'venue_address' => $row->venue_address,
'venue_city' => $row->venue_city,
'venue_state' => $row->venue_state,
'venue_zipcode' => $row->venue_zipcode,
'contact_name' => $row->contact_name,
'contact_email' => $row->contact_email,
'contact_phone' => $row->contact_phone,
'contact_website' => $row->contact_website,
'create_date' => $row->create_date,
'active' => $row->active,
);
}
return $data;
}

Answer 1

I guess your start_date column has the DATETIME or the TIMESTAMP data type. If that isn't true, please update your question.
There's a common trap in date-range processing in all kinds of SQL, due to the fact that when you compare a pure DATE with a DATETIME, they hardly ever come out equal. That's because, for example, DATE('2011-07-1') means the same thing as 2011-07-01 00:00:00.
So you need
start_date >= '$start_date_start'
AND start_date < '$start_date_end' + INTERVAL 1 DAY
instead of what you have, which is
start_date BETWEEN '$start_date_start%' AND '$start_date_end%' /*wrong!*/
The second clause with the < ... + INTERVAL 1 DAY picks up all possible times on the last day of your interval.
Edit Now that you've disclosed that you have two DATETIME columns, called start_date and end_date, it sounds like you're looking for items which start on or before a specific date, and end on or after that same date. Try something like this:
WHERE DATE(start_date) <= DATE('$specific_date')
AND DATE(end_date) >= DATE('$specific_date')
The trick on queries like this is to spend the majority of your time thinking through and specifying the results you want. If you do this, the SQL is often perfectly obvious.