Need some advice on project
Howdy ya'll.
I would like to write a program, but I need help with some of the details.
If someone could help me every once and a while I'd appreciate it.
Here's what the program should do:
I ride a bicycle a good bit and I keep records of all my rides. For a while
I kept them in Lotus 123, but transferred them to paper when my old computer
died. Here's an example record (yesterday's):
Ride #
395
Date
10-1-99
Route
H-608-648-640-608-|hwy 52 @ Fancy Gap|-608-640-648-608-H
Miles
24.60
Time
94' 58"
Average Speed
15.54
Total Mileage since 6-27-97
4670.65
Description
Windy!!
The records usually run horizontally instead of vertically.
Those are road numbers in the "Route" field (the "H" stands for Home).
The "||" means I turned around at that intersection.
I would like for the program to store/retrieve/sort/find these records. It
should be able to find/sort by ride number, date, mileage, time, average
speed, or route. I'd also like for it to (eventually) draw graphs of
various fields over different ranges, etc. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
To begin with, it will be command line driven (DOS). It needs to be easily
expandable so that I can add a GUI in the future.
Here are some questions I have:
What would be the best way to store the date? It needs to be able search
for things like "all the records with dates between 6-9-98 and 8-23-99".
For this purpose, it seems like storing the date in a numerical format would
be best; but I'm not sure how to do that.
As you can see, the "Route" field is long compared to the others (and that
example is a short one). There's a lot of repetition between records (i.e.,
I travel the same routes over and over again). In order to make the field
more searchable, and to conserve space, I was thinking that it might be good
to let each route be represented by an integer. The integer would be stored
in the file with all of the records, and a separate file would store a table
relating each integer with a specific route.
Another feature I'd like for it to have is a kind a auto-completion. By
"auto-completion" I mean that, as you're typing the route, the next matching
route appears. If it's not the right one, then you simply keep typing.
(Similar to the location box auto-completion feature of Internet Explorer.)
I don't know how do this either...needs to search through the table of
integers and records as you type...
I can't decide whether to store the average speed and total mileage or let
the program calculate them each time the database is run. Seems like the
latter method would take a lot of time, and complicate the searching and
sorting processes.
I keep the time in minutes and seconds, but perhaps it should be kept in
seconds and converted to minutes only when displayed.
Storing the records in a file would be easier in Euphoria than any other
language I know of, but I'm still not sure of the best way to go about it.
Sorry this is so lengthy.
If anyone is interested in helping me, I'd 'preciate it.
Ben
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