Calendars (CALE)

A Calendar object is a container for Calendar Events. A Calendar Event is a set of rules that result in selecting certain days in the Calendar. You can include as many Calendar Events as you need in a Calendar object. You can also reuse the Calendar Events that are assigned to a Calendar when defining another one. As an administrator user, you define and maintain company-wide Calendar objects. As a developer and object designer, you assign Calendars to objects to apply date conditions to them. These conditions determine when the objects are executed and when they are skipped.

Object class: Active object

Object type/Short name: CALE

Important related documentation:

• Calendars are only useful after you have assigned them Calendar Events. Read the Calendar Events documentation before starting your work.
• Have a look at the following topics for examples of how to use Calendar conditions in Schedules and Workflows:
  • Example: Scheduling Tasks with Time and Calendar Conditions
  • Example: Getting Data, Updating the Database, and Sending a Report

Overview

A Calendar must contain at least one Calendar Event. Calendar Events reside exclusively within Calendars. You cannot access Calendar Events without opening one of the Calendars in which they are being used. For this reason, it makes sense creating multiple simple Calendars that contain individual Non-Recurring, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Calendar Events. You can then create more complex Calendars that combine them using Group and Offset Calendar Events. This means that creating Calendar objects consists of multiple steps. You can think of it as defining layers of date/time definitions, from simple to highly complex, that you can combine.

Example

1. Create a basic Calendar that defines the weekdays and the weekends, each of them being a Calendar Event.

2. Create the next layer in a Calendar that defines the working days, which result from subtracting the national holidays from the weekdays. You can reuse the weekends event of the basic Calendar.

   The system supplies standard Calendar Events for national holidays in most the countries. You can use and edit them, or create your own ones.

3. You want to execute certain tasks only on the last day of the month, provided it is a working day. Create this calendar based on the working days one.

4. For the cases in which the last day of the month is a non-working day, you want to have two possibilities:

   •  Skip processing the tasks altogether.
   •  Postpone processing to the next working day.

   You define this calendar building up on the previous one.

These are a few uses cases. The Calendar object is a flexible tool that can cover virtually any combination of events to manage execution start dates.

Standard Calendars and Settings

Client 0 is supplied with several standard Calendars and Calendar Events that can be assigned to objects in all the Clients in your system.

The UC_CLIENT_SETTINGS - Various Client Settings contains parameters that are relevant for Calendar objects:

• The FIRST_DAY_OF_WEEK key specifies which is the first day of the week, whether Monday or Sunday.
• The NOW_MINUS and NOW_PLUS keys determine the validity period of calendar calculations. They specify how many years in the past and in the future are used to perform calculations based on Calendar Event definitions.

Best Practices

Create several small Calendar objects with few Calendar Events each instead of large complex ones that are difficult to manage. This boosts flexibility and helps achieve well-performing calendar calculations.

Store Calendar Events referring to each other in one Calendar object to facilitate transporting, importing, and exporting them. For more information, see Transporting and Importing/Exporting Calendars.

Defining a Calendar Object

A Calendar definition is made up of the following pages:

• Standard pages that are always available, no matter what type of object you are defining:
• General Page
• Version Management Page
• Documentation Page

• The object-specific page, where you add the Calendar Events. The following Calendar Events are available:

  • Non-Recurring Calendar Events
  • Weekly Calendar Events
  • Monthly Calendar Events
  • Group Calendar Events
  • Offset Calendar Events

For more information, see Examples of Calendar Events.

Calendar Page

On this page you define many of the most relevant properties of the object. It consists of the following elements:

Toolbar with the following buttons

• Edit

  Indicates whether the object is in edit or in read only mode

• Save

Left navigation pane

Opens the available object definition pages

Main central section

• The dates selected by the assigned Calendar Events are highlighted. You can select a different year to check the dates in the future or in the past.
• The Filter button opens a pane on the right that lets you restrict the number of entries displayed on the Calendar Events pane.

Calendar Events pane

List of Calendar Events that are assigned to the Calendar, see Calendar Events . Right-click a Calendar Event to open a context menu with the functions available to that Calendar Event.

Filtering Calendar Events in a Calendar

Use the Filter function to find the Calendar Event that you need in Calendars that contain many Calendar Events.

1. Select the Filter button on the Calendar toolbar to open the filter pane.

2. The following filter criteria are available:

   • Calendar Events

     Enter the name or part of the name of the Calendar Event. By default, the filter uses implicit wildcards at the beginning and at the end of the string you enter. For example, entering WORKDAYS actually triggers the search for *WORKDAYS*. The following results are also suggested in the drop-down list:

     • LOCAL_WORKDAYS
     • WORKDAYS_LOCAL
     • LOCAL_WORKDAYS_25

   • Calendar Event Type

   • Maintained

     These options are relevant for Non-Recurring Calendar Events only. Use these options to search for Calendar Events according to their expiration dates.

   • Include Calendar Events occurring

     Restrict the results to Calendar Events that select dates within the time frame you enter here. You have the following options:

     • Enter dates in both From and To to specify a period.
     • Enter the same date in both fields to filter Calendar Events that contain a specific day.
     • Enter a date in either field to filter Calendar Events with dates from or until a specific date.

3. Select the Filter button at the bottom of the pane.

   The content of the Calendar Events pane displays now only the ones that match your filter criteria. The caption indicates that the list is filtered by showing a filter icon. The caption reads, for example, Calendar Events (4 of 15). This means that this Calendar contains 15 Calendar Events but only 4 are currently displayed due to the filter settings.

Duplicating Calendar Objects

The following example illustrates the behavior of the system when duplicating Calendars:

• Calendar A has several Calendar Events, two of them being Group and Offset ones. Both refer to another Calendar Event in Calendar A.
• Calendar A is duplicated, the copy is called Calendar B.
• The Group and an Offset Calendar Events of Calendar B do not refer to the Calendar Event in B but to the one in A.

For more information, see Duplicating Objects.

Transporting and Importing/Exporting Calendars

The following considerations are important when importing Calendars:

• If you are importing Calendar A and Calendar B contains Calendar Events that refer to A, you must also import those Calendar Events.
• Calendars are recalculated after each import. If this calculation takes place before the Calendar Events have been read, error messages might occur. You can ignore them, no manual interference is required.

For more information, see Importing/Exporting Objects and Transport Case.

See also: