Hey Tim,

So I think the Getting Started file should be a good place to get an idea of what the code is doing. But I also wanted to include this readme from my original project in order to kind of help you get situated with what is currently there.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Also, if you have an idea for a better name, I've got no problem changing it.

Schedule

This project is primarily focused on being able to encode a repeating schedule and how to create new events. It is not concerned with marking them as complete or late.

Want to be able to handle encoding the following formats:

Due Monday, repeat every 2 weeks
Start Monday due Friday, repeat every 2 weeks
Due First Monday of the Month
Start on First Monday, due Friday, repeat every month
Due Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, repeat every 2 weeks
Form elements:
Name
Frequency
Interval
Days of week (checkboxes)
integer
duration
General todos:
Be able to "search" schedule_items to see if any are coming up
Ask schedule item to give all of the todos between two dates
Ask schedule to give the next repeat after a given date giving it the start date
- Need to handle multiple days (Mo, We, Fr)
  Various Processes

Obviously naming convention can be change, mostly I was trying to keep it short.

Creating a schedule

The goal is to make this a simple form for the user to fill out and then for the Schedule class to setup the properties accordingly. See tests for example params.

Creating a schedule_item

A schedule item is simply a join table between a Schedule and an InspectionStructure. Since a schedule can be something like "Every other Monday", when the user adds this schedule_item we could give them the option of when this schedule should start (vs starting when it is created).

A ScheduleItem is responsible for creating new todos.

Creating schedule_todos

In order to create a ScheduleTodo we ask the ScheduleItem to give us all of the ScheduleTodos for a given time frame. For example, for the month of March. ScheduleItem then loops through it's existing ScheduleTodos (in Rails this would just be a database query) to see if any of them fall into the time frame.

If there is any, then we'll use the last date from those todos for the next part (we'll add one day to it). If there aren't any todos for that time frame, then we'll use the beginning of the requested time frame. We take that date and ask the Schedule for the next occurrence of the event. In order to calculate that, it also needs to know the start_date from the ScheduleItem.

The Schedule is then responsible for returning the next date that satisfies the schedule on or after that given date. This way if the user says "It starts next Monday" then that Monday can be included as the first todo. This date is then given back to the ScheduleItem. It will create a new ScheduleTodo and set the date as it's start_date and set the end_date as start_date plus the Schedule's duration.

Calculating the next date

This is probably the most complicating part. There are two parts to it.

Finding the First Date

Schedule will use the start_date of ScheduleItem in order to figure out the first instance of that schedule. This will then be used to find all future instances. Based on the freq it will have to compare the date to what is closest matching date that satisfies the schedule. This logic is handled by the #first_date method.

Finding the next occurrence

The #next_date method will then use that first date to find the next. It will first look to see if there are any adjacent days matching (such as a schedule that is "Mo, We, Fr"). If there are not, then it will use the #frequency_length to find how many days away the next instance is. For example, given a schedule that is "Every other Monday" and we know our first date is a Monday, we just need to add 14 days to it to find the next occurrence of the schedule.

Since we are only concerned about one date at a time, we can continually pass the date back through the #next_date method in order to find the next occurrence.

Adding New Schedules

This has been my process for the tests to create in order to make a new schedule:

Schedule#create - need to be able to pass in params in order to create a schedule
Schedule#next_occurrence - define the first / subsequent occurrences
Schedule#next_date - the basis for figuring out the next date

ryanjm / rails-event-manager

Getting started #1