Scheduling with Date Mod Part 2

So as the title suggests, this is the second part of a series on scheduling. In the first part we did some basic setup. Now we are ready to dig in. The goal here is to be able to model any recurring pattern no matter the cycle.

The linchpin in this solution is to define an anchor date and the cycle length for every schedule. Given those two pieces of information, we can calculate the day of cycle for any given date using date mod. So lets create a couple of tables.

Scheduling with Date Mod Part 1

One question that seems to come up a lot is how to model recurring schedules. That’s understandable, because schedules can get out of hand pretty quickly.

We need a template so that we can define a schedule and then some how project it out on a repeating basis. The single week schedules are pretty easy. We just record the day of week and for each schedule and day we look up that day of week to get the shift for that day.

Temporal Data Slides

For whatever reason, some folks thought that having to listen to me for 45 minutes just wasn’t enough. So here are my slides.

temporal_data

XPath style filtering in E4X

One area of Flex/ActionScript that seems under documented is how to do XPath style filtering with E4X. It works pretty much the same way. But with a syntax is just different enough that I’m left looking back thru my code every time I need to do it. Now I’ll look here instead


-- E4X
root.foo.(@attribute == 'bar').baz
-- XPath
/root/foo[@attribute == 'bar']/baz