CrazyStat

Version 1.71 RC1

How do relative time-spans work?

This is an advanced feature which is meant for preset creation. If you do not plan to create your own preset, there is no need to use this.

To define a good and useful preset, you will need to set either relative time-spans or "total time" for all of the modules.

This document includes information which is necessary to create your own preset via CrazyStat's "Manage presets"-feature (GUI). This is a quite easy way to generate your own preset. If you want to create advanced presets, you might have to do this manually because the GUI is somehow restricted.
If you have successfully created presets via GUI, you might want to read advanced_presets.html for more information on how to (manually) write presets.

If you want to save a preset, time-settings are somehow complicated. Let's assume you want to have the "Visits/Hour"-Module display today's visits. You could click the calendar, choose the current day and that's it. But if you save this as a preset, this preset will only work for one day. The day after, the setting "today" means something else than the day before. You would need to change your preset every day if you want to do this with absolute time-spans.

So that's why there are relative time-spans. With these, you say that your time-span starts "today" and ends "tomorrow". These are strings, which can be entered (exactly like this) into the "Start"- and "End"-fields for relative time-spans. Every time the statistic is being analyzed, CrazyStat will calculate what "today" means at the moment.

So what can be entered as "start" and "end"?

These strings are parsed using php-function strtotime(). Have a look at the manual.

Before passing the string to strtotime, some special characters are replaced:

These are defined completely the same way like the php-function date() does.

Examples (everything in one line means the same thing):

today, %Y/%m/%d, %d.%m.%Y
tomorrow, %Y/%m/%d +1 day, today +1 day
yesterday, %d.%m.%Y -1 day
now, %Y/%m/%d %H:%i:%s
next saturday, %Y-W%W +%w days +6day

You see in most cases, there are a dozen of ways to achieve the same result.
Hint: You nearly always need to add "-1 second" to your "end"-String. Because if you want to get all hits for today, setting "tomorrow" as end-string will be 1 second too much, as midnight of tomorrow is not today.
You might say that there will never be hits for 00:00 of tomorrow as that's always in the future. You're correct in this case. But if you want the first of the last month as start (e.g. "%Y/%m/1 -1 month") and end of last month as end, the end should be "%Y/%m/1 -1second". If "-1 second" is missing, the visits of midnight of the 1st of this month would be included. You could also use "%Y/%m/1 23:59:59 -1day".
Attention: This sounds stupid, as there won't be a lot of hits in this second. But if you don't use this, caching might not work efficiently for your preset because time-end of your preset might look different to CrazyStat compared to another preset, but in fact it's just different by 1 second.

Time-span names

You can give your time-span a name, which will appear at the top of the module. This could be a text like "Today". But you could also set "%Y/%m/%d" to get the actual date. All the replacement-characters listed above work the same way.

Start #

"Start #" makes it possible to start with the oldest entry. Let's say you want to show all the visitors of the last 30 days in "Visits/day".
You would set start "today -30 days" and end "tomorrow -1 second". This will do fine, but older entries might end up at the bottom of the module while today's entry is somehow in the middle. To get a nicer view, you can tell CrazyStat to start with a particular one, e.g. with #5. But of course, this changes as well.
So here, the same characters as above are replaced. For the example above, you could use "%d+1". Note that here, only simple operations like plus and minus are allowed.

Check your time-span!

You can always press "Check" to see what the representation of what you entered would be at the moment. This is very useful for "debugging" your relative time-span.