Re: Need some advice on project
From: Ben Logan wrote on Saturday, October 02, 1999 6:34 AM
Subject: 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):
Sounds like a nice project - not overly complex, but useful.
> 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
....
Hwy 52 at Fancy Gap? That sounds familiar. Where are you?
....
> 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.
You could store it as a sequence {yyyy,mm,dd} and it would be easy to sort
with custom_sort() as well as compare for less-than, equal, or greater-than.
> 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.
A reasonable choice, especially if you might want to keep additional data
about the routes (a map, perhaps, or terrain measurements)
> 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...
Build your route description byte by byte (as it is typed in) and after each
character, do a wildcard_match() against the route file using the
description & "*".
Probably you'd want to display a list of matching routes, and either select
the correct one from the list, or continue typing if it is a new one.
> 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.
Average speed won't change from run to run, as it's based on fixed values:
miles and time. So compute it once (at input time) and store it. Total
mileage might better be computed. Don't be concerned about computation time,
it won't be significant.
> I keep the time in minutes and seconds, but perhaps it should be kept in
> seconds and converted to minutes only when displayed.
I would keep it as a sequence {hh,mm,ss} and do the conversions to and from
seconds as needed with a couple of short functions. That would make the
display or printout formatting simpler.
Regards,
Irv
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