1 - Worked days and rest days, day labels
The fact that a day is a working day or a rest day is important information to place activities.
Therefore, the program allows to define in preferences the repetitive rest days. These days are usually Saturday and Sunday, and a number of public holidays.
The program contains a mechanism for taking into account holidays. Unfortunately these holidays vary from country to country and even within countries in different regions or states. That is why it is provided a base that will allows each user to define his repetitive rest days based on local regulations and customs.
Some days without rest may be of particular interest to the user (eg family birthdays). That is why this mechanism will also allows to define labels for repetitive days.
2 - Settings
Settings contains the display options: step for minutes, list lines height, PDF default character set..
3 - Preferences
Preferences are information selected by the user to be taken into account by default for each day. Their changes have no impact on the data that has been entered by the user and stored in the database. By cons they are taken into account for the days that use the default information for the creation of tasks and events, and displays.
They are initialized the first time the program is executed depending on the country provided by Java code, and saved between runs. They can be changed or reset by the user.
Can be found in the preferences:
The program allows to define four types of rest days:
For days label, we have the same options except weekdays.
3 - Defaults for rest days
To facilitate the definition of these dates I introduced defaults to initialize these dates with the holidays which are not a Sunday every year. Unfortunately these holidays vary not only between countries but also with regions or states of these countries ...
I am limited to four options: France, United Kingdom, United States, other.
France is the country that pose least problems: the public holidays are the same for almost everyone: 8 annual days non-deferred and three Easter relative days .
The UK has 8 national days (3 annual days reported if they are a Saturday or a Sunday, 2 Easter relative days and 3 ranked days), and special days for Scotland, Wales and North Ireland. I limited myself to the national days that the user will complete if necessary.
In the U.S. the days depend on each state. However, there are 10 days federal holidays for some federal services and they are more or less taken into account by the states. I provide this federal list, and each user should adapt according to its state.
For other countries, I provide a list of 7 days which are used in many countries. Everyone can add and subtract days to this list.
4 - Weeks
Uses in defining week and week numbering varies with countries. For most west European countries the week starts on Monday and week 1 of the year is the one that contains the first Thursday of the year. For the United States, week starts on Sunday and week 1 is the week of January 1. The information provided by Java are normally adapted to local customs and we use this information.
5 - Hours
The time of day can be presented in 24-hour format or 12-hour format with AM PM. But times may exceed midnight and it must be presented hours located in next night or morning. By analogy with AM and PM, we chose to follow them by EM.