Re: Cenceptual help needed - periodic events

Pat,

> I'm goofing around, designing a planned maintenance system. In a
> couple of
> weeks I'll be taking on the actual scheduling of tasks. How would you
> experts out there approach this? I've beeen thinking I can approach
> this two
> ways.

I'm working on a legal calendar system, and we're storing all events as
rows in the database. However, in our case the reasons are
overwhelming, since the rules on how new events are generated (aside
from those entered by users) are complex enough to fill several pages.
Calculating on the fly isn't conceivable.

Also, all of our events are, at one level or another, dependant on a
user-entered event. Thus we can make all auto-generated events
"children" of the parent event and change them when the parent changes.

I designed another system that was all auto-scheduling -- a weekly
produce delivery system. In this system, we took the expedient of not
generating any even more than a week ahead of time, and providing
functions that would drop all events and then re-create them,

Differently, in a time entry system I designed all of the due dates for
timecards were calculated on the fly by a complex view.

So it depends on the number and complexity of the rules you will be
applying. If the rules are very complex and/or require procedural
logic, you probably want to generate and store records. Otherwise, no.

-Josh

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