Tip: Work Time Calendar Expiration - extension solution

  • 13 November 2019
  • 5 replies
  • 631 views

Userlevel 7
  • Superhero (Employee)
  • 1368 replies

The work time calendars in IFS are used for a range of different things such as SLA calculations, calculating lead times in manufacturing and supply chain, scheduling window calculations etc. Each calendar is setup with a schedule and a start and end date. Once a calendar has been setup, the details (basically generating a list of dates based on the schedule) needs to be generated via a background job and triggering the generation is a manual process. Once a calendar expires, you run into a whole raft of problems, having too long of a time horizon can also cause performance issues.

 I’ve created a configuration that aims to automatically extend the calendars before this happens. 

It will add two new fields on the calendar schedule line to allow you to define the calendar as auto-extending and allows you to define by how much to extend it each time. 

 

Attached is a document to describe this in more detail. This was done for Apps 9 but I’m fairly sure it’d work for Apps 10 as well.

 

 


5 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

This is a neat solution for a 24x7 calendar.

Just need to bear in mind exceptions for things like bank holidays/non working days won’t be covered under this, any ideas on how to come up for a solution for these?

 

Userlevel 7

This is a neat solution for a 24x7 calendar.

Just need to bear in mind exceptions for things like bank holidays/non working days won’t be covered under this, any ideas on how to come up for a solution for these?

 

That would just be exceptions linked to the calendar, so that should be fine. And the scope of the calendar doesn't matter here, we're just extending the schedule validity, not adjusting the schedule details. 

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

Just thought about it actually, there is nothing stopping me adding in exceptions in for the UK public holidays over the next 20+ years and then using this method to auto extend the calendar each year. Thanks!

Userlevel 7

Just thought about it actually, there is nothing stopping me adding in exceptions in for the UK public holidays over the next 20+ years and then using this method to auto extend the calendar each year. Thanks!

You don’t even have to do that. As long as you’ve linked an exception Id to the calendar, the change will be reflected the next time the job runs to extend the validity. This way all you need to manage is the schedule exceptions.

Userlevel 7
Badge +21

In IFS10 would it not be possible to connect to https://calendarific.com/ (or for that matter any other calendar api option) to retrieve the correct holidays?

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