Too Many Capitals

17:31.22 - Saturday 28th February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I can tell I've been doing a lot of MySQL lately, because the little finger on my left hand is aching like crazy from holding down the left shift key - the reason being I enter all of my SQL commands and fieldsnames in capitals, so I can be holding down that same key quite a bit.

The Lotto admin area is progressing again. I've created the page to allow me to insert results into the database, which was a major pain to get working before, but which now actually went along quite easily.

A single page is used to enter the details for each draw, so it must be able to handle anywhere from 5 to 7 regular numbers as well as up to two bonus numbers. Not only that, it also has JavaScript validating of the numbers that you (try to) enter, and that has to be able to handle different draw types as well. Somehow, somewhere along the line, everything worked first time with no major hurdles to overcome.

To test it, I added the Euro Millions draw to the available games (you can now do this from a page in the Admin Area, rather than dabble in the databases manually) which is a 5+5 game - five resular numbers from 1 to 50 and 2 bonus numbers from 1 to 9. The site allowed me to enter the three sets of numbers that have come out so far with no problems whatsoever, huzzah!

Splitting the results table into several pieces was probably the best thing I could have done. Not only do I not have to worry about new draws completely cocking up the system, but I can also erase two fields from all of them - the draw type (which is now part of the table name) and the draw number (which is now the same as the record number in each table). This makes the tables even more efficient than before. Which is nice.

So what's next? Porting the user-data over would be a favourite for 'Next Thing To Do' I reckon, which means I'm going to have to look into the more complicated maths functions for the password encryption. Ordinarily I would normally just MD5 the password and store the hash value in the database, but MD5 wasn't (I think) available to me when I wrote the site in VBScript.

I'm going to have to put a lot of effort into the automation side of things as well, so that I can leave the site to update itself to a certain extent. It would be nice to have it update everything, but I'd settle for just the Daily Play draw. We'll see, however.