Hello,

I am not very familiar with cron jobs, I have a script that runs once a day, it sends an email with daily reports. I'm not sure how cron jobs work, how they run the page or anything, so i was wondering if i have a php script that at the moment it runs opens a pop up window depending if the user is logged in, will it work if it is run with the cron job? i hope it makes sense, it might be a stupid question but i have no idea if this is even possible..

i would have something like this

if($user == $_SESSION['username']){
echo 'pop up window';
}
else{
echo 'email to the user;
}

Thanks for your help

Not sure I understand what you're asking.

The code you posted wouldn't make sense for a script that is intended to be executed by cron because there is no user. I'm not even sure if you can successfully start a session in this case, but it certainly wouldn't work as you expect it to.

so i was wondering if i have a php script that at the moment it runs opens a pop up window depending if the user is logged in

PHP scripts do not open up pop up windows. The output generated by a PHP script might indicate to a user's browser that it should open another window, but the PHP script is not 'aware' of this. If you have a PHP script that spits out some HTML and JS that, when parsed by the users browser, opens a popup it won't work as expected as a cron job; there is no browser to parse the output and open the popup.

So, what I'm guessing you need is that if the user is on-line, he'll get a popup {else} he'll get a mail. You didn't say if you need the report to be delivered at some specific hour so, I will just suppose you need it "once a day" at any hour he'll be online. If he will never visit, at the end of the day will get a mail.

1. The user is online and at some point he visits the website. When he's logged in you also know he's there and you can deliver that report as a popup AND you also mark it in your database as "send for GEORGE".
2. At the end of the day you only send reports for those users that didn't get the popup.

From my experience, you should do both (show a popup when he's online and send him an e-mail at the end of the day)... a popup may be accidentally closed and he might loose the report. If you send it on e-mail it's safer.

Originally Posted by vectorialpx

So, what I'm guessing you need is that if the user is on-line, he'll get a popup {else} he'll get a mail. You didn't say if you need the report to be delivered at some specific hour so, I will just suppose you need it "once a day" at any hour he'll be online. If he will never visit, at the end of the day will get a mail.

1. The user is online and at some point he visits the website. When he's logged in you also know he's there and you can deliver that report as a popup AND you also mark it in your database as "send for GEORGE".
2. At the end of the day you only send reports for those users that didn't get the popup.

From my experience, you should do both (show a popup when he's online and send him an e-mail at the end of the day)... a popup may be accidentally closed and he might loose the report. If you send it on e-mail it's safer.

Yes i am trying to do both, show the pop up and send the email. the job runs every 15 min. it is not a report, it is an alert to remind the user the pending task he has at the time the job runs. the user should be online all day. the problem here is there is no way to find out if the user is online running a cron job is it?

so i was wondering if i have a php script that at the moment it runs opens a pop up window depending if the user is logged in, will it work if it is run with the cron job?

No and No.

PHP runs on the server and once the page is delivered to the client browser cannot affect anything.

To do what you require will need Java applets/servlets. (That's JAVA not javascript.)

Thanks.. im gonna have to find another way to achieve this :/

Originally Posted by stivens

Yes i am trying to do both, show the pop up and send the email. the job runs every 15 min. it is not a report, it is an alert to remind the user the pending task he has at the time the job runs. the user should be online all day. the problem here is there is no way to find out if the user is online running a cron job is it?

If you want to do both, just run the cron once a day (send one mail per day) and after the user gets the popup (if he does) you mark in his `users` table a flag "gotTheMaiToday" = date(Y-m-d) and every time you check if `gotTheMaiToday` is NOT today ( != date(Y-m-d) )

You also can know if the user is online in a cron job, but you will have a margin of error.
After he is loggedIn you can show the popup and you also mark a flag - a new column in the users table (let's say "LastAction" - datetime, default = 0) so at every user action (every page he will access) - you can have this in your config file or, some file that is everywhere - you update the `LastAction`. Something like this

PHP Code:

<?php
# any action he takes, any page he visits
# this can be in some common (config) file
if( ISLOGGEDIN ) {
    executeQuery ( '
        UPDATE `users` SET `LastAction`=NOW()
        WHERE userId="hisIDFromSession"
    ' ) 
}

In the cron, check if the user was online in the last (let's say) 15 minutes.
If he doesn't do anything for 15 minutes that means he's not active anymore.
So, you have

SELECT `userId` FROM `users`
WHERE CURRENT_DATE < DATE_ADD(LastAction, INTERVAL 15 MINUTE)

And you get a list (of IDs) with all users that are on-line.