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.

This page includes the following:

Important related documentation:

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:

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:

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

Left navigation pane

Opens the available object definition pages

Main central section

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:

For more information, see Duplicating Objects.

Transporting and Importing/Exporting Calendars

The following considerations are important when importing Calendars:

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

See also: