Re: [PHPiCalendar-DEV] Emailing events proof of concept

[Jon C. T. <cal...@wa...>]

I've given some thought to that issue, myself.  I think it would speed 
up display times for users on a slow link.

My main events calendar features a weekly repeating event with a fairly 
lengthy description.  With things implemented as they are, that one 
description is included up to ten times in the output of month.php!  
Once for each week it appears in the month view, and then once again 
for each time it appears in the list of events at the bottom.  Thank 
goodness it's not a daily repeating event.  :)

So replacing those ten instances of description text with UIDs would 
help a lot.  Especially since they delay the drawing of the main page 
table, without contributing to its appearance.

Incidentally, this would also solve a problem we encountered with CGI 
deployments of PHP.  Event descriptions can't contain slashes, or PHP 
will fail to load and the pop-ups will come up blank.  Our workaround 
for now is to escape %2F with %1B.

On the other hand, constructing the master_array is quite a lot of 
start-up cost.  Arguably too much for just a single pop-up event 
description.  Especially if the source calendar (or calendars!) are 
located on a remote server.  The difference in load times would need to 
be regained by good caching.  Or at least by having an optimized path 
to look up a single event's description from a single calendar file.

Even if the decision is made to keep event descriptions in the code of 
the main page, we can still reduce the duplication, and improve the 
page display times:

Add each description to an associative array based on UID.  Then 
construct one JavaScript function at the end of the file (after the 
main tables are closed).  That function would define the associative 
array and its contents, look up the event description based on the UID, 
and perform the pop-up there.

That way repeating event descriptions would only appear once in the 
file, and a browser would be able to draw the visible table even while 
the as-yet invisible descriptions are still loading.

The same associative array in JavaScript could eventually be used with 
the DOM to show event descriptions as hover effects.  That wouldn't be 
possible if we moved them entirely into event.php.

On Sunday, December 1, 2002, at 03:54  PM, Bill Fenner wrote:

> What I'd like to do is to change event.php so that instead of being
> told all the useful info about the event, it gets passed the calendar,
> date, time and uid -- that way it can grab the right stuff out of
> the master_array to display, plus it can know those bits to pass them
> along to email.php so there can be an "email this event" link from
> the event.php popup .