Joern's Blog

Yesterday I worked a little bit on my TODO list for iteration 3 of my Formula One Tracks & News Mini-Project.

Actually I worked on the "Highlight and focus the next racetrack + focus GMap InfoWindow" mentioned in my "Formula One Tracks & News - Iteration 3 - Adjusted Scope" blog post.

To highlight the next race, I needed to calculate the smallest difference between today and the upcoming racetracks (+ all the possible exceptions). Actually I used this very useful GERMAN - sorry for that ;) - "JavaScript - Beispiele: Datum und Uhrzeit" tutorial to get started.

And this is my nice JavaScript function, that highlights the next upcoming racetrack:

// global Variables used in checkNextRace funcion
var difsmall	= -9999999999999999999999999;
var t1 		= new Date();
var tday 	= t1.getDate();
var tmonth 	= t1.getMonth();
var tyear	= t1.getUTCFullYear();
var today 	= new Date(tyear, tmonth, tday);

and

function checkNextRace(racedate,nn_a)
{
  var month 	= racedate.substring(5,7);  
  var day 	= racedate.substring(8,10);
  var year 	= racedate.substring(0,4);  
  var month	= month-1;  
  var rday 	= new Date(year, month, day);  
  var difcur 	= today - rday;     
if(difcur > difsmall && difcur <=0)
  {
    nn_a.id = "current";
    difsmall = difcur;
  }
}

This tiny JavaScript is the reason, that e.g. today (03/19/07) the "04/08 - Sepang International Circuit" is marked/highlighted (because it's the next race track):

Furthermore I decided NOT to "focus the next racetrack + focus GMap InfoWindow" because I like it more to see all racetracks, when loading the page.

So far the status update from my Formula One Tracks & News Mini-Project.

If you have any questions, feel free to trackback or refer to my work in progress version.

-Joern