Google Chart Map Chart Time Zone Primer Tutorial
The advantage our Map Chart interfacing web application has regarding its use of the Google Charts API is that it is written in a serverside language, that being PHP, and that means that after questions it could go up and look up an interactively entered piece of information from the user and compare it against a database or file, or in our case, soon, with a set of inbuilt PHP Time Zone functions, to link “where” and “when”, perhaps, by linking a user entered place name with a Time Zone name, perhaps. As with many such interfacings, this will not work for every place, of course, and our initial draft of interfacing changes with our Map Chart web application, rely on an exact match of place names with Time Zone place names, but we’ll see over time some other ideas we can try to improve this all the more.
If we do find a link to a Time Zone place name, we’ll present the user, in the onclick “select” event logic, a chance to delve further into other deeper sources of information here. Applications often refer to this idea as “drilling down” into the data. We’ll be doing that aspect to the two part interfacing, tomorrow. But today we just concentrate on the Google Chart Map Chart web interface we have being, internally, capable of …
- asking for this extra information … dependent on whether the user has flagged to use “&onclick=y” onclick “select” event … as a suffix to the user entered Place Name … for example …
Sydney|Australia/Sydney|+11|12:50
… corresponding to “PlaceName|TimeZoneName|GMTOffset|TimeRightNow” … and then … - analyzing the $_GET[‘data’] or $_POST[‘data’] data for the existance of this extended information, and presenting it in the onclick “select” event Javascript prompt window we present as an option “T” that if typed in navigates the user to a Time Zone Converter webpage where details like when Daylight Saving last kicked in and out are “value adds” to the functionality mix
Where are we going to apply this idea? Well, maybe you were around when we presented Weather API via Iframe jQuery Ajax Map Tutorial not so long back. We interfaced the Map Chart as a “grandchild” to the “parent” Weather Underground Interfacing web application. Today’s thoughts could improve on that in that the Map Chart could also be appearing with those useful onclick “select” event functionalities up at the “parent” level as well.
These new interfacings affect both the “parent” HTML and (the code underlying the) “grandchild” PHP pieces of code so that …
- the “parent” changes we’ll be showing you soon
- map.php PHP code has this live run (relevant, because these changes make the “grandchild” Map Chart web application independently able to access this new place name interfacing improvements) and it changed for these new ideas in this way (for phase one of two of the changes to the “grandchild”) … helped enormously with respect to code timing between the PHP writing out the Javascript via the use of array.push() method
You can see this in action with today’s PDF slideshow here 
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