How to implement a schedule of recurring events?

Rails
1

Hello,

I am fairly new to Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I am creating an
application that “has many :groups”, each with their own schedule of
events. This is a little different than a calendar of events, since
these events recur every week and do not have a specific date. So for
example, I need to display a schedule for one group that looks like
this:

Group A’s Activities

  • Monday at 4pm - Football
  • Tues/Thurs at 8am - Tennis

I also need to create a form that allows someone to enter new or
update existing activities.

I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around how to implement a
system like this, and I can’t seem to find any gems that do this
already.

Can you provide some advice as to how to implement a system like this?

Thanks!

2

Take a look: GitHub - jmettraux/rufus-scheduler: scheduler for Ruby (at, in, cron and every jobs)

3

the whenever gem is also me! take a look into github
Em 05/07/2011, s 16:19, Andrew escreveu:

4

the whenever gem is also me! take a look into github

“Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and
deploying cron jobs.”

Like I said before, I am not trying to schedule a cron job, I am
trying to display a schedule of events.

5

Take a look:GitHub - jmettraux/rufus-scheduler: scheduler for Ruby (at, in, cron and every jobs)

Thanks, but I don’t think that gem will help me any:

“rufus-scheduler is a Ruby gem for scheduling pieces of code (jobs)”

I’m trying to display a schedule of events, not schedule a script to
be run.

6

On 06 Jul 2011, at 01:52, Andrew wrote:

the whenever gem is also me! take a look into github

“Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and
deploying cron jobs.”

Like I said before, I am not trying to schedule a cron job, I am
trying to display a schedule of events.

I believe you’re looking for temporal expressions. There are a few
gems out there that do that kind of thing. I believe it’ll just come
down to which API you like best:

http://rubygems.org/gems/temporals
http://texp.rubyforge.org/
http://runt.rubyforge.org/

You can combine Runt with Chronic if you want:
http://townx.org/blog/elliot/ruby_temporal_expressions

For more information, you can just google “ruby temporal expressions”,
plenty of information out there.

Hope this helps.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

7

I had a lot of success on my second Rails job with this one:

I used it to build a training calendar for a multi-tenant medical
practice system. It worked really well, and was fairly simple for me
to modify to my needs.

Events are owned by some other model, so each model can have its own
events. I used that feature to show one calendar for each practice,
which sounds like it might fit your bill. It has a table-based
calendar layout, and handles multi-day events and partial-day events
very neatly (in terms of the HTML). The only thing it lacks is a
little “blog-style” mini-calendar with highlighted days.

Walter

8

I had a lot of success on my second Rails job with this
one:GitHub - bigtiger/event_calendar: Show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows. Rails plugin.

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I’ve looked at that one already.
Unfortunately, a lot of the libraries/gems that I’ve found are more
like event “calendars” than event “schedules”. The problem is that the
same schedule of activities occurs every week, so the calendar view
would not be very useful since every week would look the same,
repeating itself into eternity.

If anybody knows of a gem that displays schedules or has done this
sort of thing before, let me know.

Thanks,
Andrew

9

I believe you’re looking for temporal expressions.

I believe that I am, too. I came across Runt and that lead me to the
article written by Martin F. about Temporal Expressions.
Definitely a step in the right direction. However, I still can’t wrap
my mind around how to create a form that I can use to create these
temporal expressions, then how to convert the temporal expressions
into a schedule layout.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Andrew

10

On 07 Jul 2011, at 16:57, Andrew wrote:

I believe you’re looking for temporal expressions.

I believe that I am, too. I came across Runt and that lead me to the
article written by Martin F. about Temporal Expressions.

Would be nice if you could include my original message the next time,
it’s easier for me to remember what I posted instead of having to
search my mail for the original reply :slight_smile:

Definitely a step in the right direction. However, I still can’t wrap
my mind around how to create a form that I can use to create these
temporal expressions,

It all depends on the complexity of your recurring events really. I’d
suggest starting off by building a form that incorporates the schedule
parameters you want to convert into a Runt expression. You could use
something like what Google C. does, which is pretty basic, or
you can go full out complex with multiple combined expressions etc.

Your biggest challenge after that will be to convert the parameters
that come into your controller into a Runt expression. I’d suggest
writing a dedicated class for that, something like

class RuntExpressionBuilder
def initialize(params)
# code goes here
end
end

Runt has some nice docs on how to create expressions at
http://runt.rubyforge.org/doc/files/doc/tutorial_te_rdoc.html

Not much I can do to help you here, you’ll just need to bite the
bullet and write something that works for you based on what the docs
provide.

then how to convert the temporal expressions
into a schedule layout.

Once you have your expression, you can ask it to give you all the
dates in a certain range that comply with your expression:

require ‘runt’
require ‘date’
include Runt

mon_wed_fri = DIWeek.new(Mon) | DIWeek.new(Wed) | DIWeek.new(Fri)

schedule =
mon_wed_fri
.dates(DateRange.new(PDate.day(2011,7,7),PDate.day(2011,7,20)))
puts schedule

2011-07-08T00:00:00+00:00
2011-07-11T00:00:00+00:00
2011-07-13T00:00:00+00:00
2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00
2011-07-18T00:00:00+00:00
2011-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

It’ll be up to you to determine how you want to display that schedule
to the user of course. You can generate some kind of calendar like has
been suggested or keep it plain and simple with a list. It all depends
on your application I guess.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt