Basic concepts: Settings, preferences, non-worked days and dates

1 - Settings

User may choose by settings the line height in displayed lists, the time display step (between 1 hour and 1 minute), extended memory area (private or public) for saving new projects, default character set when creating PDF files (standard or extended), and beginning of names given by default when creating projects, tasks, events or groups.

2 - Preferences

Preferences are information chosen by the user that are taken into account when creating the project. Their changes have no impact on projects already created, unless the user makes a reset command. They contain definitions of days, dates or ranges not worked, dates worked by exception, and work horaries.

3 - Not worked days

Days not worked are days that do not depend of the year and are in principle not worked all years, this may be the weekly rest days, legal holidays, customs of the company or user. The program defines four types of days:

• weekdays, for example, Saturday, Sunday (we also have the option Saturday + Sunday),
• annual days which are fixed every year (eg December 25 Christmas ),
• ranked days, defined by one month, one weekday and the rank of the day in the month from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating the last of month (eg Thanksgiving last Thursday in November),
• days relative to the Western Easter (eg Good Friday two days before Easter).

Following country annual days may or may not be carried forward to Monday when they fall on a Sunday or Saturday,thus you may choose the report option.

To complete you can define:

• not worked dates, dates not worked a defined year,
• not worked ranges (start date and duration) eg holiday periods,
• exceptionally worked dates, dates that correspond to not worked days but still worked.

4 - Work horaries

You may define work horaries :

• for ordinary days,
• for a week day,
• for a date.

A day horary may have one or several worked periods, each period is defined by begin time and end time.

A default horary is defined for ordinary days (2 periods, 8 h 30 AM to 0 h 30 PM, 14 h PM to 18 h PM).

5 - Defaults for not worked days

To facilitate the definition of these dates, I have introduced defaults to initialize these dates with the legal holidays that are not on a Sunday every year. Unfortunately these holidays varies not only with countries but also with regions or states of these countries ...

I limited myself to four options: France, Great Britain, United States, other.

France is the country that poses the least problems: legal holidays are the same for everyone: 8 not reported annual days and 3 Easter relative days.

In Great Britain, the United Kingdom 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 UK national days that the user will complete or modify 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.

6 - Dates

The program is intended to plan projects for the following months, so the dates are usually initialized to the current date in order to simplify their modification.

It is not forbidden to go back to January 1, 1970 (date 0 for computer scientists!), But I did not see fit to allow to go beyond.

Also I limited the dates to December 31, 2099, not taking into account the particularity of the year 2100.