To remove these svn folders from your project, right click on the project > Build Path > Configure Inclusion / Exclusion Filters…

Click “Add…” next to the “Exclusion patterns:” box. Add the rule “**/.svn/”. The “**/” will make it a recursive rule. Click Finish and your annoying .svn folders should now be hidden in the file browser.

When deciding what the data structure should look like, I wrote some pseudo XML that we need to be able to model.

A Node has a (string) $type, (mixed) $attributes and (NodeCollection) $children. Using the above XML as a reference, our root node (let's call it $root) would have $type = 'channel' and no attributes. You would then add two nodes to the NodeCollection $children, owner and list. Owner would have $attributes of array('name'=>'testuser', 'email'=>'test@test.com') and $children would be an empty NodeCollection.

The biggest design decision made about NodeCollection was that NodeCollection implements Iterator. By implementing Iterator, you can later foreach over $children and it can loop through the elements with no problem. Implementing Iterator is a pretty cool design pattern - I'll have to write a post about it in the near future. The ability to foreach over $children helps tremendously when writing ExportNodeToXml.

Wrapping up, pseudo code to export and object to a Node that can later be transformed to XML would look like this:

Let's look at a simple example. I have an array containing values, some are numeric, some might not be. I only want my array to contain the valid numeric entries and I want to delete the other values. PHP has a helper function we are going to be utilizing, is_numeric.

The output from above is:

Array
(
    [0] => 42
    [1] => 96
    [2] => 100.96
)

Pretty handy function. Notice how I ran my data through the function array_values, before that function was run, the keys were (0,2,4).

Another example with a user defined function. I have defined a collection of tags and I want my tag collection to only contain tags that match the criteria the user has requested.

Voila! Deleting elements from an array has never been easier.

For more information, see the php documentation on array_filter.

I put together a quick page that I can navigate to that will install a cookie for the browser. I can then check for the cookie in my standard header include so the Google Analytics tracking code isn't sent to the browser.

The code to set the cookie (and make sure it's installed correctly)

Similar (but inverse) code is then inserted in my header

Analytics is a great tool and it's going to be even more useful now that I won't be tracking my own hits.

Since I'm using Prototype for my javascript library already, I took advantage of the Prototype Window Class to make modal and dialog windows. One of the downsides to this is it adds another step of complexity to ensuring everything is properly synchronized. For example, my scheduler window has to maintain in sync with it's parent window if dates where changed at that level.

To start off, I create actions for nextDay() and prevDay(). These are simply fired onclick() on buttons with corresponding labels.

Next we'll define the updateAvailabilityChart() function. The arrayInviteUsers holds an array of user ids (this is out of the scope of this article).

The above code will make an Ajax request to get_availability.php which will increment, decrement or keep the start and end dates the same and then return some cool response text starting with the new start date, new end date and html for the availability table. I defined a delimiter of '^^;;^^' just so I can tell where data starts and stops. Below is the basic code in get_availability.php.

Finally, the Ajax request defined a function to be called when the request return successfully. This function will update the innerHTML of a div on the page and tell the parent window what the new start date and end date is.

This is a very small piece of a very large project but it's fun to share with others. If you have questions or could benefit from some more of the details going into this basic process, let me know and I can post more.