QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

First The Wrapper, Introduction, Part 1

So jumping right in . . .

I’ve been working on a little application using the Basecamp Wrapper, and basically just fooling around with the UI now. Just because I’m dicking around, doesn’t mean you should have to suffer. So here are some nuggets.

The idea for the app was that I wanted a big simple todo list that combined all the todos I had from all the different projects in a meaningful and useful order. So first and foremost its collecting all the todos in a single array and then making use of them.

In my Customcamp class:

function find_all_uncomplete_todos($in_project = false) {
    if ($in_project) {
        $projects[] = $in_project;
    } else {
        $projects = $this->projects();
    }       
    $to_dos = array();
    foreach ($projects as $project) {
        $lists = $this->lists($project->id);
        $lists = ($lists->id)?array($lists):$lists;
        foreach ($lists as $list) {
            $list_data = $this->list_items($list->id);
            //print_r($list_data);
            if ($list_data && $list_data->{"todo-items"}->{"todo-item"}) {
                foreach ($list_data->{"todo-items"}->{"todo-item"} as $todo) {
                    if ($todo->completed == "false") {
                        $todo->in_project = $project;
                        $todo->in_list = $list;
                        $to_dos[] = $todo;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $to_dos;
}

Thats just a seemingly complicated function that does a pretty simple thing. Just a lot of nested loops is all. It fetches all the projects. Then for each project it fetches all the lists. Then for each list it fetches all the incomplete items for the list. Then it puts each of those todo items in one big array of every incomplete todo. As a convenience it also stores the list and project meta data for each todo in in_project and in_list respectively. This is useful because it allows us, in an HTML page for example, to iterate over the array of todos and print the meta data as well. Now this is all fine and dandy, but why is this function different from the todo views in Basecamp itself? You’re right. Its not. Thats why we’ve got to add the magic ingredient, which in this case is a simple ranking algorithm. For my purposes, I wanted the list to be ordered with the most pressing items at top. So I came up with this simple ranking algorithm based on the list positions within the Basecamp account.

todo->position * list->position * (now - time_the_project_was_last_modified)

Though a todo’s position is scoped to the list that its on, this creates a number that can be used as a rank for scope of your entire account. So to apply this to the function:

// calculate rank
$todo->rank = $list->position * $todo->position * 
                (time(+1) - 
                $this->convert_ruby_timestamp($project->{"last-modified-on"}));
//this is just so they all have unique keys
$todo->rank += (rand(0,50) * .000001);
$to_dos["$todo->rank"] = $todo;

By adding a minuscule random number to the rank we can use the rank as keys for a humongoid array of all our todos. Then to get them in order all we have to do is:

ksort($to_dos);

I have a very good use for this function, but even if you don’t I hope this was informative. Grab the full code here.

Posted August 1st, 2006 in Development, Geekery, Software/Scripts
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