Countdowns, and generally speaking comparisons with Today’s date, have been a recurring theme on my blog.
SharePoint 2010 hasn’t brought much improvement to the “Today” issue, so the workarounds published on my blog in 2008 remain a good reference, either the one I wrote for Data View Web Parts or Alexander Bautz’ follow up article for list views.
A year ago, I blogged about two other solutions, one relying on jQuery, the other on Flash and ClockLink.com (the demos are not active anymore).
Today I am showing two new examples that are much simpler than the previous ones. The live demo is here:
http://sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com/Portfolio/Pages/Countdown.aspx
Why much simpler? Because the only thing you need in the page is my Text to HTML script – the exact same that is used for color coding calendars. The calculated column will take care of all the rest (for example the formula to calculate the difference between target date and Today, or the color selection).
Note that there’s a key difference between the two examples: the “Countdown” column relies on the local time of your computer, while the “TimeAndDate” column pulls today’s time from TimeAndDate.com. In the past, I have already highlighted this important choice (for example, don’t use the local computer time if you’re building an auctions site!).
The drawback of this new approach is redundancy - the current date is calculated for each item. So I would recommend to only use it for views with few items.
You’ll notice that the column filters also render the HTML (cf. above screenshot). That’s because the page uses a custom version of my Text to HTML. It is still work in progress, so please don’t copy this script!
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