significant progress

So I was waiting outside the DC and I caught sight of Dr. McMahon as she was going to a meeting or something. And all of a sudden I realized that while I'm not making hardly any progress on the virtual parasite project part of my research this semester, I can at the very least finish Project Mickey (which actually would be useful to them, like, NOW).

So I sat down and:

* Finished the php for the Record Death page
* Changed the mouse mark to a selection box instead of a text field
* Reloaded all of the database tables so that there are two fields for the entry date and entry time instead of just one timestamp
* Changed the php files so that they send two values: one for entry date and one for entry time instead of just one timestamp
* Fixed the Java Script which checks to make sure that every field of the form contains something (excluding the notes field, of course, which is optional). I even figured out how to check selection boxes which had been giving me trouble before.
* Tested everything
* Found some problems
* Fixed them.

WOOT!

Dr. Iba and I worked out how we could use a java program to go through the logs of the data that has already been entered. If it can output a string that is a correctly formatted URL, that can be sent to the php file which will format an SQL query with will insert it into the new database (since that is what the mouse entry forms do anyway). It would probably use the string parser that our CS30 class created for the CS130 project. It'll run through the file three times.

The first time, it will find all the records that include birthdates for mice. It will create an entry in the mice table, and two records in the moves table: not-born to birthcage, birthcage to weaned cage. This first time, the transfer date for BR to W will be the same as the birthdate.

The second pass through it will find all the records that include cage transfers and it will create an appropriate entry in the moves table.

The third pass through it will create all the records for the readings table.

Then we can go back and change the transfer date for BR to W for each mouse to the date of the first reading for that mouse. There's no guarantee that they didn't make a couple readings before recording a mouse's birthdate, so we have to do this last.

Dr. Iba will probably make this a CS30 project which is really cool--it'll be interesting to work on a CS30 project that I really care about because it's MY project. I hope the rest of the class doesn't hate me for making work for them though ;-)

Between now and then though Dr. Iba is going to have some of Dr. McMahon's students test-drive my entry forms. It's so nice to be able to make actual progress on something for a change.