business_time

ActiveSupport gives us some great helpers so we can do things like:

5.days.ago

and

8.hours.from_now

as well as helpers to do that from any provided date or time.

I needed this, but taking into account business hours/days and holidays.

Usage

install the gem

gem install business_time

sudo gem install business_time

if you require sudo to install gems

open up your console

# if in irb, add these lines:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_support'
require 'business_time'

# try these examples, using the current time:

1.business_hour.from_now
4.business_hours.from_now
8.business_hours.from_now

1.business_hour.ago
4.business_hours.ago
8.business_hours.ago

1.business_day.from_now
4.business_days.from_now
8.business_days.from_now

1.business_day.ago
4.business_days.ago
8.business_days.ago

# and we can do it from any Date or Time object.
my_birthday = Date.parse("August 4th, 1969")
8.business_days.after(my_birthday)
8.business_days.before(my_birthday)

my_birthday = Time.parse("August 4th, 1969, 8:32 am")
8.business_days.after(my_birthday)
8.business_days.before(my_birthday)

# We can adjust the start and end time of our business hours
BusinessTime::Config.beginning_of_workday = "8:30 am"
BusinessTime::Config.end_of_workday = "5:30 pm"

# and we can add holidays that don't count as business days
# July 5 in 2010 is a monday that the U.S. takes off because our independence day falls on that Sunday.
three_day_weekend = Date.parse("July 5th, 2010")
BusinessTime::Config.holidays << three_day_weekend
friday_afternoon = Time.parse("July 2nd, 2010, 4:50 pm")
tuesday_morning = 1.business_hour.after(friday_afternoon)

Usage in Rails

The code above should work on a rails console without any issue. You will want to add a line something like:

config.gem "business_time"

to your environment.rb file. Or if you’re using bundler, add this line to your Gemfile:

gem "business_time"

This gem also includes a generator so you can bootstrap some stuff in your environment:

./script/generate business_time_config

Or in Rails 3:

script/rails generate business_time:config

The generator will add a /config/business_time.yml and a /config/initializers/business_time.rb file that will cause the start of business day, the end of business day, and your holidays to be loaded from the yaml file. You might want to programatically load your holidays from a database table, but you will want to pay attention to how the initializer works - you will want to make sure that the initializer sets stuff up appropriately so rails instances on mongrels or passenger will have the appropriate data as they come up and down.

Outside of Rails

This code does depend on ActiveSupport, but nothing else within rails. Even then, it would be pretty easy to break that dependency as well (but would add some code bloat and remove some clarity). Feel free to use it on any ruby project you’d like!

Contributors

* David Bock  http://github.com/bokmann
* Enrico Bianco  http://github.com/enricob

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

TODO

I’d like to return ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone just like the equivalent ActiveSupport helpers do.
if it doesn’t pollute the logic too much, I’d like to vary the days counted as ‘business days’. Bakers often don’t work on Mondays, for instance.
We don’t care much about timezones. Dunno if thats an issue.