PHP Lotto Diary

10:52.26 - Sunday 22nd February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Kind of. I'm playing catchup this morning because I haven't touched the Lotto rewrite since I last mentioned it - there's simply been far too much real work going on for me to even look at it.

I had originally intended to just redo the page that sends out all the emails, because the ASP service was falling over partway through the routine and it was too doddery anyway. I wrote a wee script to connect to the DSN but it turns out that the same thing won't work on the server because PHP there hasn't been compiled with ODBC supports. I can't even remember how to recompile it without going on a big hunt around the web, so I've basically continued with the rewrite.

Currently I've reached the stage where I'm going to have to dynamically add tables to the MySQL database. I've decided to do with the idea of having all of the results for the different draws in seperate tables because I can think of no reason why they would ever need to be in the same one. Actually I just realised: The Lotto Hotpicks game uses the results from the Lotto Main Draw, so it won't need it's own results table - must remember that.

This is the problem I have: There's so much data flying about and so many Ifs and Thens that I have to take into account. I have to make the website handle anything I can throw at it, which is easier said than done when Camelot et al go and bloody release a new bloody draw that doesn't work on the bloody site. Gits.