General developer forum

Actually it should be

 
$datestart = new DateTime();
$datestart->setDate(2014, 01, 01);
$dateend = new DateTime();
$dateend->setDate(2014, 01, 02);

And it accomplishes several things. In order to determine if some UNIX timestamp is in specific date regardless of the hour we need to compare it with the two timestamps. First is the start of that day and second one is the end of that day. So if the date in question is january first 2014 we need to make sure that timestamp of entry in database is between 01/01/2014 00:00 and 01/01/2014 23:59 or less than 01/02/2014 00:00. So in order to make that check we need to construct these two unix timestamps which I did with DateTime class.

$datestart = new DateTime(); // Initializaes datetime object
$datestart->setDate(2014, 01, 01); // Sets the date, by default hour is 00:00 so we do not do here anything
$timestart = $datestart->getTimestamp(); // get unix timestamp from datetime

$dateend = new DateTime(); // Initializaes datetime object
$dateend->setDate(2014, 01, 02); // Sets the date, by default hour is 00:00 so we do not do here anything
$timeend = $dateend->getTimestamp(); // get unix timestamp from datetime

// timestart is now pointing to the 01/01/2014 00:00
// timeend is now pointing to the 01/02/2014 00:00
// our time must be greater or equeal to timestart and less than timeend

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I finally managed to get this working the way I want. I had a couple of very small syntax errors in my query. The final properly functioning query and function look like this:

function facetoface_dailycount($userid, $facetofaceid, $thissessiondate){
global $CFG, $DB, $USER;

$thisdate = $thissessiondate;

$count = $DB->count_records_sql
('SELECT COUNT(su.userid)
FROM
{facetoface_signups} su
JOIN
{facetoface_signups_status} ss
ON
su.id = ss.signupid
JOIN
{facetoface_sessions} fs
ON
su.sessionid = fs.id
JOIN
{facetoface_sessions_dates} sd
ON
fs.id = sd.sessionid
WHERE
ss.superceded = ?
AND
su.userid = ?
AND
fs.facetoface = ?
AND
ss.statuscode >= 60
AND
FROM_UNIXTIME(sd.timestart, "%e %M %Y") = ?', array(0, $userid, $facetofaceid, $thisdate));

// Condition below
$perday = $DB->get_field('facetoface', 'perday', array('id' => $facetofaceid));

if ($count >= $perday) {
return true; //this blocks the user from booking any more sessions for that day
} else { //Less than the value in perday

return false; //allow booking for that day
}
}

I had d B Y for the unixtime formatting, which came from Moodle code. I don't know where the B comes from but MySQL didn't like it. Changed it to e M Y (d M Y should work too...or rather, I need to figure out if B in Moodle results in single characters for single digit dates or if it returns 01 for the first etc.). Also, I needed a space after each formatting option.) And, double quotes...single and no quotes wasn't working. 

At any rate, this seems to be working now how I want it to (fingers crossed). I need to do some more testing but so far so good.

Posting the details here just in case someone is searching for something related to this. 

Regards

Jason