Cookies!

This morning I was trying to get a simple task done--display a message to the user when they have completed a week of the challenge. However, it turned out to be a little more complicated than I thought due to the fact that I had to save the number of the last week displayed as well as boolean which would be true if the modal with the message had been displayed and false otherwise. In a regular application (using Java for example), you could save these values somewhat persistently as static variables (or serialize them for more permanent storage). However, since this is a web application, every time a page reload occurs, the variables in the Javascript code would get reinitialized and nothing would work. After some googling, I found that there was a handy jQuery Javascript file called jquery.cookie.js that could be be used to store variables persistently as cookies.  A value can be saved by calling

$.cookie("nameThisVariable", "some value");

and then could be accessed by calling

var thisVar = $.cookie("nameThisVariable");

This allowed me to store the two values I needed to ensure that the message was only displayed once a week was complete and would not be redisplayed when the user reloaded the page.

Another task I tackled this morning was figuring out how to tell the user (once they had completed a week) when they could start checking in again (since our website only allows so many check-ins per week and once you complete your check-ins for the week, you cannot check-in until next week). Getting the time itself was easy because this is stored in our Week model. However, it has been trickier to figure out how to format the time based on time zone. By default, the timestamp is returned from Rails as UTC, which is not very user friendly. I then used the "in_time_zone" Ruby function to convert UTC time to MST explicitly. However, if we have users on central time, pacific time, eastern time, etc., this will not work. I will have to look into using Devise to get the user's timezone when they sign up so that we can then tailor the time display to the user's current timezone.