Calculating tardies using google script - google-apps-script

Question

I am trying to create an attendance system that calculates tardies based on certain criteria. First off, each student member has a row dedicated to them in the spreadsheet. (Ie, student1's attendance is found on row 3, student2's attendance is found on row 4, etc.). Each student has personal information in the first few columns. Then each student has an attendance record for the meeting. All attendance information comes in pairs with a sign in time and a sign out time.
A student receives a tardy if they show up after 6:30 PM. They also receive a tardy if they are present for less than 2 hours. So I wrote a code to calculate the number of tardies.
/**
each student has one row dedicated to their attendance. Sign in and sign out are always in pairs. I will ensure that the range
begins with range[0][0] being the first sign in time.
#param range the row for the student's attendance
#return the total tardies for each student
**/
function calculateTardies(range){
var search = range[0].length;
var tardies = 0;//initially set to 0
for(k = 0; k<search; k+2){ //go through the entire row of the student's sign in and sign out times (k+2 because they always come in pairs)
var timeIn = new Date(range[0][k]); //sign in time will always be at a K value
var date = Utilities.formatDate(timeIn, "EST", "EEE"); //get the day of week that time stamp is
var timeOut = new Date(range[0][k+1]); //sign out time is to the right of the sign in time
if(date == "Tue" || date == "Wed" || date == "Thu"){ //they only need to be there for 2 hours Tues-Thurs
var checkHour = Number(Utilities.formatDate(timeIn, "EST", "HH")); //The hour student arrived
var checkMin = Number(Utilities.formatDate(timeIn, "EST", "mm")); //The minute student arrived
var outHour = Number(Utilities.formatDate(timeOut, "EST", "HH")); //hour student left
var outHour = Number(Utilities.formatDate(timeOut, "EST", "HH")); // min student left
//If the student wasn't present for at least 2 hours, add a tardy
if((checkHour+2)*60+checkMin < (outHour*60)+outMin){
tardies = tardies+1;
}
//if the student left before 6:30 PM, add a tardy
if((checkHour*60)+checkMin > 1830){ //11100 is 6:30 PM in minutes 6PM=> 18 hours * 60 min = 1080 minutes + 30 additional minutes
tardies = tardies+1;
}
}
}
return tardies;
}
To check if they are there for two hours I had to change the time stamps to minutes. I found that I couldn't simply compare the times as is. The same applies for why I changed the arrival time to minutes before comparing it to 6:30 PM.
I am running into an error that states exceeded maximum execution time (line 0). Any advice on how I can change the code or fix this error would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I am running into an error that states exceeded maximum execution time
You have an endless loop that makes your code run until it exceeds maximum execution time
This endless loop is created by the definition
for(k = 0; k<search; k+2)
depending on what you want to do, the correct syntax is either
for(k = 0; k<search; k=k+2)
(if you want to increase k by 2 after each iteration) or
for(k = 0; k<search; k=k++)
if you want to increase k by 1 after each iteration.
I found that I couldn't simply compare the times as is.
Dates are proceeded in Apps Script the same way like in Javascript.
The documentation provides many useful methods and examples of how to wokr with dates.
In a nutshell:
If you want to calculate the difference between two timestamps - the easiest way might be to convert both dates to ms with getTime(), substract them and convert the difference back to hours (1 h = 1000*60*60 ms)
If you want to know the weekday of a date, you need to use getDay()
For working with dates it is recommendable that they are formatted as such in your spreadsheet, rather than manually converting them from numbers inside your script.