You Can Call Me Al

I just came across some existing code in a "revamping" project I'm working on that just didn't feel right. It was to produce a select dropdown of hourly time ranges in a day, in 24hr format: 00:00-00:59, 01:00-01:59, etc.

This was being achieived by using 2 loops. A first looping from 0-9 and building the times using 0#i#:00 - 0#i#:59. Then another loop from 10-23 and changing it slightly to be #i#:00 - #i#:59. Clunky, eh?

First thing that popped into my head was that it could easily be created with 1 loop from 0-23 using numberFormat() to include the leading 0 when required. But then I seemed to remember being told ColdFusion can loop over dates/times.

Not ever trying this before, I decided not to jump straight on Google but to open up my trusty play.cfm to have a try at it.

And strangley enough, it only took 2mins and worked first time.

<cfset fromTime = createTime(00,00,00) />
<cfset toTime = createTime(23,59,59) />
<cfset timeSpan = createTimeSpan(0,0,60,00) />
<select>
	<option value="">- Select Time -</option>
	<cfloop from="#fromTime#"to="#toTime#" index="i" step="#timeSpan#">
	<cfoutput>
	<option value="#LStimeFormat(i)# - #LStimeFormat(dateAdd('n',59,i))#">#LStimeFormat(i)# - #LStimeFormat(dateAdd('n',59,i))#</option>
	</cfoutput>
	</cfloop>
</select>

Pretty self explanitory really, create 2 proper timestamps and a timespan. Loop from and to the timestamps using the timespan as the step. Then just format the index variable as required. Job Done.