Need advice on elapsed time

[magnumrp]

I've searched the web and have yet to find any way to make FM Pro fields display time the way I need to. I'm thinking about developing an event manager that has different sessions during the day with potentially hundreds of events in each session. I would like to have a time related bar across the top that would display:

Session Start Time: Date/HH:MM:SS (static) +Session Running Time: HH:MM:SS +Session Ahead or Behind Schedule Calc: HH:MM:SS (elapsed time display so we know if we're staying within the time alotted)

Event Start Time: Date/HH:MM:SS (static AM/PM) + Event Running Time: HH:MM:SS +Event Ahead or Behind Schedule Calc: HH:MM:SS (elapsed time display so we know if we're staying within the time alotted)

The event organizer puts in when they want to have the Session start time and the suggested length of each event (which is usually 2 minutes) when setting up the event. FM then calculates End Time by adding number of events + breaks and gives an estimated Session Time.

But I'd love to have some way to continually get feedback to the event MC using the software how we are doing on the time schedule.

Is there any way to implement this in a FM layout? If not any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Version: v5.x

Platform: Mac OS 9

[BobWeaver]

Some basics about how time and date are handled by filemaker:

Time fields can hold either absolute time like 10:15 AM (a quarter after 10 in the morning) or elapsed times like 75:10:14 (75 hours, 10 minutes and 14 seconds). Internally, they are stored as the number of seconds. In the case of an absolute time, it is the number of seconds since midnight. The total number of seconds in a day are 86400.

Dates are always absolute, and stored as the number of days since December 31, 0000.

You can subtract times and dates to get durations, and you can add/subtract durations from times and dates to get start/end times and dates.

Here are some examples:

DurationSeconds = DurationDays * 86400

DurationSeconds = (EndDate - StartDate) * 86400 + EndTime - StartTime

EndTime = Mod(StartTime + DurationSeconds, 86400)

EndDate = StartDate + Int(StartTime+DurationSeconds/86400)