Scheduling in Ruby on Rails

Rails
1

Hi all,

I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I am looking for
some sample code to help with writing some code for scheduling
maintenance for machinery. The idea is that, like a car, this
machinery needs maintenance either at certain intervals or after a
certain number of hours of use (whichever is sooner). I am not sure
how best to manage the time measurements (DateTime or Time?) or how to
build the business rules to do the measurements and comparisons
robustly.

I wondered whether anyone here could direct me to an example.

Thanks,

Ian.

2

it all depends on your machine. nobody can tell you what’s right (or
even the best) for you. you gotta decide for yourself.

to show you some alternatives:

  • you could just work with cron-jobs.
  • you could use backgrounDRb or workling/starling to schedule your own
    processes.
3

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Ian P. [email protected] wrote:

I am not sure
how best to manage the time measurements (DateTime or Time?) or how to
build the business rules to do the measurements and comparisons
robustly.

I wondered whether anyone here could direct me to an example.

If you don’t need increments smaller than 1 day, I prefer to use the
Date class.
I find it easier than Time to work with:

A few simplistic examples:

date = Date.today
=> Mon, 02 Mar 2009
next_month = date + 1.month
=> Thu, 02 Apr 2009

date = Date.new 2009,01,31
=> Sat, 31 Jan 2009
next_month = date + 1.month
=> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 # automatic rounding down to valid date

date = Date.new 2008,02,29
=> Fri, 29 Feb 2008
next_year = date + 1.year
=> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 # automatic rounding down to valid date
four_years_later = date + 4.year
=> Wed, 29 Feb 2012

Always be careful with comparing dates near the end of the months
as months have a variable length.

Easier comparison of date_1 == date_2 (compared to time_1 == time_2)

date_1 = Date.today
=> Mon, 02 Mar 2009
date_2 = Date.today
=> Mon, 02 Mar 2009
date_1 == date_2
=> true
time_1 = Time.now
=> Mon Mar 02 11:24:59 +0100 2009
time_2 = Time.now
=> Mon Mar 02 11:25:06 +0100 2009
time_1 == time_2
=> false

HTH,

Peter

4

On 2 Mar 2009, at 10:28am, Peter V. wrote:

If you don’t need increments smaller than 1 day, I prefer to use the
Date class.
I find it easier than Time to work with:

  • no ambiguity over “now” being a different date in different time
    zones etc
  • easier to compare date_1 == date_2

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/Date.html

Thanks Peter,

Those are good examples. You mention using Date for increments that
are not smaller than one day. In fact my situation is a hybrid, since
the machinery may be running at intervals over several days (so I
would need to track a usage event that spans days) but I need to
record the total number of hours of use during that time. From what I
can see the DateTime class allows for this. I suppose what I am really
asking here is under what circumstances would I use the Time class:
using DateTime always gives me more information doesn’t it?

Ian.