Lotto site progress...

13:22.31 - Monday 29th August 2005   (Link to This Entry)

I've been putting in more hours with the new Lotto site over the past few days. It's a bank holiday here in the UK so I've got a few hours to spend on it today as well.

I've completed the member number handling area, where members of the site enter their own lines for later comparison to draw results. Members can add, edit or delete lines as they see fit, and the script takes into account all game types, and even extenson games that use the same set of member lines - which is currently only the Lotto Extra. If Camelot decided tomorrow that all lottery game types were going to use the same set of numbers, the site should be able to handle it.

The way I've structured everything is completely open-ended, which makes for more compliated code and a whole lot of thinking, but lets me do far more funky stuff with the numbers. For example, you'll be able to enter Daily Play lines and play individual lines on individual days, and the site won't care - it'll just handle it automatically. I'm quite proud of it, really.

A lot of the coding is finding elegant solutions to problems rather than bodges, and for this reason I've sometimes scrapped a section two or three times to rewrite it. Progress is slower because of that, but the end result is more efficient, more stable code that just works.

One bodge I did implement was a fix for overlaying DIVs onto SELECT boxes in Internet Explorer. Apparently the SELECT (along with Flash, which is why I junked the Flash numbers approach) box is rendered as a window in IE which means it completely ignores all Z-position coordinates. Plonking an IFRAME at the exact same spot, above the SELECT and below the DIV, works as a clipping mask and shows the DIV how it was meant to be shown - over the SELECT. The fix is only required for IE, so I had to then go off and implement some browser detection. *Sigh*.

So far everything's looking sweeeeet.