I was tooling around mint.com the other day and noticed that after a certain amount of time a notice appeared at the top of the screen to inform me that I was about to be logged out. Then after the time ran out I was returned to the login screen.

A few weeks ago, a coworker was asking if there was a better way to deal with being logged out on a backend system I put together. Once I saw the mint.com system I knew I had to try to build something like it. So I did, it’s not exactly the same because of the system I’m using but it works just as well and looks good doing it – I also wanted it to be a simple addition.

Getting started;

Have some idea of how to use jQuery, I don’t think what I’ve done here is hard – but at least understand some basic concepts like the $(document).ready() function,.fadeIn(),.click(),etc. For PHP, have an idea of $_GET variables, and header locations. Then some knowledge of Javascript itself, and an understanding of loops and counting.

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The Project

In one of my projects, I thought it would be cool to have a drop down select box trigger a slide down for the results, then slide up and slide back down when a new choice was selected. Seemed pretty easy, but when I got into it, it wasn’t as easy as I thought at first. But in all reality it turned out to be super easy.

I did some digging around to figure out how to tell if my div container (the one that would hold all the results) was visible or not, maybe I should just read the entire JQuery documentation – HA! Instead I turned to google and found that you can check for :hidden.

$("#div-id").is(":hidden");

So I can base my logic on that, if it’s hidden do this or if it’s not do this…

That was perfect, now it was just a matter of having it do exactly what I wanted. So if the div wasn’t hidden, I needed to hide then show it again with the new results. Or if it was hidden, show the results. Continue Reading »