Forum OpenACS Development: please test dhms-interval package/widget/datatype

1: please test dhms-interval package/widget/datatype

Posted by Jim Lynch on 08/17/05 08:45 PM

Hi,

I made a package that is not in its final form but I want to show it and request comments and bug reports.

Here is the package in my file storage. Also, here's a package you can use to drive it.

I am developing the package on openacs-5.2 core, and that's all you need of it to use the package.

The package key is dhms-interval, but the data type and widget name is dhms_interval.

usage:

ad_form -name formname -form {
    ...
    {my_interval:dhms_interval(dhms_interval)
        {label {This text tells user what the field is for}}
    }
    ...
} ...

Its "data model" consists of two plpgsql funcs that convert between pg interval datatype and my dhms_interval string form.

TODO:

start working on oracle implementation
generalize so that all of the interval structure can be used
generalize so programmers can format the form to suit their desired look

2: Re: please test dhms-interval package/widget/datatype (response to 1)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 08/17/05 08:46 PM

One more thing, please post bug reports/feature requests/etc here. I'll put up a bug tracker presently.

3: Re: please test dhms-interval package/widget/datatype (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 08/17/05 11:13 PM

Hmm.. what exactly is the purpose of your package. I'm not sure I understand

4: What package dhms-interval does and what it can be for (response to 3)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 08/18/05 05:02 AM

Hi Malte,

The purpose of the package is to provide a new form widget called "dhms_interval" and a new form data type also called "dhms_interval".

dhms_interval widget is to allow a form widget for inputting an amount of time; the overall value is a days-hours-minutes-seconds interval (a specific kind I need for an app) which is convertable to and from a postgres interval datum.

dhms_interval form datatype is for representing such a datum while it is going back and forth around a web form input process the user is going through in order to easily communicate an amount of time to the .tcl file and from there to the database and back again.

Some things you can do with intervals... you can add an interval to a timestamp to get a time which is a specific amount (spec'd by the interval) in the future, or subtract if you want to back up into the past. You can also add intervals and subtract one interval from another.

To get intervals, you can subtract two dates or two timestamps, or add two intervals or subtract one from another.

Reason why you might be interested in elapsed time... is you might want to scale time by money/time to produce an amount of money owed, or you might be interested in how long someone spent on a particular job.

As stated... I'm interested in expanding this in at least three ways...

one, it should work in oracle;
two, it should capture more of what an interval can be, which in postgres can be coarser than weeks and finer than seconds -- this would be a more generic data type, maybe called "interval"; and
three, there should be a corresponding widget type, also called "interval", under which a programmer can specify exactly what parts of an interval s/he wants, like the "date" widget does now.