Hi, i’m writing a timesheet application in which i need to know when the
holidays are, (bank holidays, etc)
Is there a very clever way of getting this info that wouldnt require me
to manually add it to my database??
Thanks
Chris
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 12:20:43PM +0100, Chris wrote:
} Hi, i’m writing a timesheet application in which i need to know when
the
} holidays are, (bank holidays, etc)
}
} Is there a very clever way of getting this info that wouldnt require
me
} to manually add it to my database??
You could retrieve and parse an ical file. Search icalshare.com for a
suitable one.
} Thanks
} Chris
–Greg
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 12:20:43PM +0100, Chris wrote:
Hi, i’m writing a timesheet application in which i need to know when the
holidays are, (bank holidays, etc)Is there a very clever way of getting this info that wouldnt require me
to manually add it to my database??
It depends on which set of holidays you’re interested in. For US
Government holidays, it’s pretty simple: there are fixed and floating
holidays. The floating holidays fall on the n-th weekday of the
month, so the third Monday in January for MLK day, the last Monday in
May for Memorial day, and so forth.
holiday-float 1 1 3 “Martin Luther King Day”
holiday-float 2 1 3 “President’s Day”
holiday-float 5 1 -1 “Memorial Day”
holiday-float 9 1 1 “Labor Day”
holiday-float 10 1 2 “Columbus Day”
holiday-float 11 4 4 “Thanksgiving”
Then there are the fixed holidays, which nominally fall on the same
day each year: January first for New Year’s day, July forth for the
forth of July, and so forth. The only trick here is that if this day
falls on a weekend, it gets celebrated on the nearest Friday or Monday.
holiday-fixed 1 1 “New Year’s Day”
holiday-fixed 7 4 “Independence Day”
holiday-fixed 11 11 “Veteran’s Day”
holiday-fixed 12 25 “Christmas”
For a bizarrely complete treatment of this subject, see the
calendar.el file from a recent distribution of Emacs. These, and a
huge array of holidays that you’ve never heard of, much less
celebrated, are all covered in detail.
– John Kodis.
In Perl i often used a BusinessDay module (CPAN) for that, which
incorporated holidays as well. Would be nice if Rails had something
like:
10.business_days.from_now
where business_days are days counted excluding Sat/Su but also
excluding holidays (w/ localized settings, of course). Maybe this
already exists as a plug-in?? In any case, this would be very useful
for a range of apps.
Sebastian