Easily Build A Time Selector

I’m working on a project where I need the user to select a time in 24 hour format.  It would have taken me a couple of minutes to punch out the lines to build a select option for each of the items that were to appear in the drop down list, but I elected to use the Enumerable.Range method instead and build the list dynamically.

Why approach it this way?  Well, if the requirements change, for example, and I need to change that to every 10 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, I don’t need to go and write another 96 lines of code. All I have to do is change the call the select projection where I compute the minutes (right now at the top and bottom of the hour).

A Picture is Worth Zero Lines of Code. Apparently.

So…I’m getting flack either way…either I post a code-image or I post a Gist. With a Gist, RSS readers can’t render the code. If I post an image, no one can copy and paste. So, there’s the image for you in your RSS readers, and here’s the Gist for those copy and paste aficionados.

Breaking Down the Code

This is actually more verbose than it needs to be but it makes it a little easier to walk through it.  The first two statements are simply capturing some integer values to represent the hours and minutes that I want to render.

    IEnumerable<int> hours =
        Enumerable.Range(0, 24);

    IEnumerable<int> minutes =
        Enumerable.Range(0, 2)

          .Select(x => x * 30);

The call to Enumerable.Range takes two parameters: the first is where to start counting and the second is how many steps to take.  In the second statement I am also projecting the minutes out by multiplying them by 30\. If I wanted, instead to have the list include 6 intervals on the 10, I would change the code to the following:

    IEnumerable<int> minutes =
        Enumerable.Range(0, 6)
        .Select(x => x * 10);

All that’s left to do is build our strings.  We’re going to loop over our hours, and then format those intro a string along with each of the minutes that we’ve projected into our list:

    List<string> timeOptions = new List<string>();

<span class="kwrd">foreach</span> (var hour <span class="kwrd">in</span> hours)
{
    <span class="kwrd">foreach</span> (var minute <span class="kwrd">in</span> minutes)
    {
        timeOptions.Add(<span class="kwrd">string</span>.Format(<span class="str">"{0}:{1:00}"</span>, hour, minute));
    }
}</pre>

That’s it! The timeOptions variable now contains a list of any of the valid options we want our user to select from. You can now easily use this collection to build a drop down list for whatever client you’re building for.

 

Want the condensed version? Check here: Build a list of valid times