Sometime ago I began work on a simple AIR tool to help me record my hours. It's been a while since I worked on it, but this weekend I decided to take another look at a nagging issue that I had never resolved. How do I do date filters in SQLite? Specifically, the "Enter Hours" screen should only show the hours you entered for today. (I plan on adding a Reports tab later to let you browse hours and generate reports.)
I worked and worked and worked on this issue before, but figured a fresh look may help. I finally got it working. I used the strftime function, which is really meant to format dates, but I was able to use it in the WHERE clause as well. This is the final code I ended up with:
hourDataStatement.text = 'select hours.description, hours.hours, hours.date, projects.name as project, clients.name as client from hours, projects, clients where hours.projectidfk = projects.id and projects.clientidfk = clients.id ' + 'and strftime("%d",date) = strftime("%d",date("now")) ' + 'and strftime("%m",date) = strftime("%m",date("now")) ' + 'and strftime("%Y",date) = strftime("%Y",date("now")) ' + 'order by date desc';In case that doesn't make sense, what I've done is added where clauses that do:
where 'format the date to show just day == the day of today' AND 'format the date to show just the month == the month of today' AND 'format the date to show just the year == the year of today'
Not incredibly elegant, but it worked!
During my testing I also ran into another issue. One thing I tell people about Flex development is - it is incredibly easy for the most part. All you have to do is get comfortable with the tag set and have an idea of what you can do in ActionScript. What is difficult is getting used to asynchronous operations. The idea that - I can run some remote function but I have to write a function to handle the result. Maybe it's just me, but time and time again this trips me up.
The problem I ran yesterday involved the start up code for the application. I had deleted my old database so everything was run fresh. I got an error stating that the schema had changed. I think I know why. My old code did this:
- Open an async connection, when open, run SetUp()
- SetUp would create new tables if necessary
- Setup used a Synch connection.
- When done, continue on the app
- The rest of the app used the original asynch connection.
So my take on the bug was - the original async connection got "confused" when the db was changed underneath it. I edited my code a bit so as we now do:
- Open synch connection and make tables.
- When done, open the new asynch connection.
And this corrected the problem. I've included both the source and the AIR installer for the latest version. Now I'm very happy as I get to play with charts and generating reports!